Wednesday, 17 September 2014

discrete mathematics - Cantor's Diagonalization & Cantor Pairing Function

I don't fully understand the concept behind...



(1) The Cantor Pairing Function and




(2) Cantor's Diagonalization Method.






I understand that (1) and (2) involve proving if a set is countable or not.



For example, let's consider the set of all real numbers, R, which is known to be uncountable. We can prove this set is uncountable using Cantor's Diagonlization method.



To keep things simple, let's look at the set of real numbers between 0 and 1. We can prove that this subset is uncountable by using contradiction. Thus, we initially assume the subset is countable, like so:





y1 = 0.x11x12x13...



y2 = 0.x21x22x23...



y3 = 0.x31x32x33...



.




.



.



yk = 0.xk1xk2xk3...




where each xij is a decimal place.



Now we can consider y=0.x11x22x33..., for y[0,1]. This particular y is the diagonal... We can now immediately see that y is not in the subset, which proves that the set of real numbers between 0 and 1 is not countable.




So now I have 2 questions...



(1) How does Cantor's diagonalization method prove that this subset is uncountable? I understand that y is not in the subset, but how does this prove we can't count everything? Is this because we can create permutations of y that are also not in the subset? For example, let y and y''' be permutations of y':



y'' = 0. \: x_{22} \: x_{33} \: x_{44} . . . \: x_{kk} . . . \: x_{11}



y''' = 0. \: x_{33} \: x_{44} \: x_{55} . . . \: x_{kk} . . . \: x_{11} \: x_{22}



etc..




(2) Can I use Cantor's pairing function to prove the set is countable or not? If I can, how would I use it? If I can't, why can't I use it?






As a side note, I saw this question earlier about Cantor's pairing function: Prove that the union of countably many countable sets is countable.



It only confused me further. I don't understand how this method creates a one-to-one mapping to \mathbb{N}

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