Before starting reading this note please go through my note on uncountability of . There I have shown that , the set of real numbers, is uncountable. Now in this note, I will show a that there exists a bijection between and . Well, obviously such bijection doesn't exists and my method has a fallacy, but I want you people to find out the fallacy yourself.
I will construct a function as follows:
From choose an arbitrary element and map it to an arbitrary element from .
Next choose an arbitrary element from and map it to arbitrary element of and continue the process.
Thus in the i-th step map the arbitrary element to an arbitrary element .
Then, from the construction of , is injective. Choose any two different elements from , and observe that they are mapped to two elements of under , which must be different (different because whenever in a step an element of is mapped to that of , the latter is deleted from before proceeding to the next step). Again is surjective because choose any arbitrary element from , see that it is the image of an element of (Since our process of construction of is infinite, this means at some step of our process we must have mapped an element of to that element of ).
So turns out to be bijective. Clearly, there is a strong fallacy in my considerations. Can anybody point it out?
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This doesn't follow. Just consider the simple function f:N→N where f(n)=n+1. The process is infinite, yet 1 (or 0, if your natural numbers start with 0) has no pre-image.
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Yes that's exactly the fallacy. The fallacy lies in the fact that the method by which the above function is being constructed doesn't guarantee surjectivity. Assume it to be surjective, then consider a closed subset of R and apply the logic that I used while proving the uncountability of R.
Well, you need to ensure thatf is indeed a function. Where have you done that?
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Every natural number is mapped to exactly one real number. That's enough to prove that it is a function.
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Consider the same argument with the position of N and R reversed. Will you say that in this case also f (if we retain the same notation) is a function?
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EDIT: Actually, f won't be a function, exactly because ∣R∣>∣N∣. First, because R is uncountable, so the process won't finish even with infinite time. Second, since ∣R∣>∣N∣, at some point there's no more element of N that hasn't been paired with.; the process of making f is halted in this way. If we allow to pick any element of N and we can handle the "and continue arbitrarily" portion, then yes, f becomes a function.
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