Sunday 14 August 2016

elementary set theory - Showing cardinality of all infinite sequences of natural numbers is the same as the continuum.

So I'm trying to show that these two sets have the same cardinality, i.e. there is a possible bijection between the two. I'm trying to use the Cantor-Schroeder-Bernstein theorem as I can't explicitly think of a bijection that will work. For this I need to find an injective map each way. I can find an injective mapping between $R$ and the set of infinite sequences of natural numbers. E.g., for each real number $x$, I can associate it with the sequence $S$, where the first element is $2^{n}$ (where $n$ is the greatest integer less than or equal to $x$) if x is nonnegative, and $3^{n}$ if x is negative. Then the rest of the sequence can be the decimal expansion of x in single digits. E.g. the sequence associated with pi through the function would be $(2^{3}, 1,4, etc)$. This is injective, so the first half of Cantor-Schroeder-Bernstein is satisfied. If I can find an injective function going the other way then I am done.




I first thought of something involving turning the digits of the sequence into a real number, but that failed to be injective as my function would not be able to differentiate between the sequences $(1,0,1,0,1,0,...)$ and $(10,10,10,...)$.



Any hints or help? I'm trying to figure it out without resorting to proofs based on cardinal arithmetic or related to the power set of N.

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