Saturday, 1 June 2013

elementary set theory - Question about cardinality of some set of functions



The question in its original form deals with the problem of deciding whether the set T of all irrational numbers in the set [0,1] such that they have only digits 0 and 1 in their decimal expansion is countable or uncountable?



I have been thinking along this lines and this form of the problem deals with the question in the title, if we look at the set S of all functions f:N{0,1} then this set of functions describe all numbers in [0,1] which have 0 and 1 in their decimal expansion, and if S is countable then obviously T is also countable as a subset of S but if S is uncountable then T is uncountable because R=ST is the set of all rational numbers in the [0,1] that have 0 and 1 in their decimal expansion so obviously R is countable as a subset of Q, which is countable.



So how to decide whether S is countable or uncountable?


Answer



The set S is often denoted as 2N, and it is not hard to show that 2N has the same cardinality as P(N), by mapping a subset to its indicator function.




Use Cantor's theorem to conclude that S is uncountable.



One can actually show further that |[0,1]|=|P(N)|, and that in fact T has the same cardinality as [0,1] as well.


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