Monday, 4 February 2013

elementary set theory - Is there a bijection between mathbbNtimesmathbbR and mathbbR



So I'm doing some practice on set theory, and I am having some trouble proving a lemma.




Basically I want to ask if there is there a bijection between N×R and R



If yes, could someone provide a simple construction of such a bijection?



Any help or insights is deeply appreciated.


Answer



For just answering the yes/no question, the easiest way is to use the Swiss knife of bijections, the Cantor-Schröder-Bernstein theorem, which just requires us to construct separate injections in each direction RN×R and N×RR -- which is easy:



f(x)=(1,x)




g(n,x)=nπ+arctan(x)



Because there is an injection either way, Cantor-Schröder-Bernstein concludes that a bijection RN×R must exist.






If you already know |R×R|=|R|, you can get by even quicker by restricting your known injection R×RR to the smaller domain N×RR instead of mucking around with arctangents.


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