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One of my students just discovered this Netflix documentary, A Trip to Infinity; I haven't seen it, but apparently at nine minutes in there's a discussion of Hilbert's Hotel which the student found useful.
I'll flash through them, you vote, and some of you will get an extra "get out of quiz free" card.
Don't wait for the last minute! (It usually shows, if you do....:_ )
Intuitively: We will say that two sets have the same size if they have the same cardinality.
Question of the day:
In particular I want to share two other ways to think about dealing with the case of an infinite number of school buses.
\[ (b,s) \longrightarrow p_b^s \]
where by \(p_b\) we mean the \(b^{th}\) prime number. Each person was assigned to a unique prime factorization, meaning no collisions.
The problem: we don't even know which natural numbers are prime -- there's no rule. We just know that there are infinitely many....
Now everyone knows exactly where to go! And hopefully the bellhops will get your luggage to the right room, too.
The problem: the correspondence isn't actually one-to-one -- for example, Room 5 is empty, and feeling lonely at the dance.
But the Hilbert Hotel (of natural numbers) is certainly big enough to accommodate everyone.
The little infinity that could!
(for this one, you can see that the two sets are actually in a one-to-one correspondence; for the others, we see that the natural numbers are at least as big as an infinite number of copies of the natural numbers -- but that should seem pretty obvious...!:).
If I put the people in the Hotel in the first column (we'll call it Bus 1), you can see that they go into the rooms numbered by the triangular numbers: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, ....
\[ n \longrightarrow \frac{n(n+1)}{2} \] More generally, for the person sitting in seat \(s\) on bus \(b\), \((b,s)\), \[ (b,s) \longrightarrow \frac{1}{2}\left(b^2+b(2s-3)+s^2-s+2\right) \] This is a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and infinitely many copies of the natural numbers.
If we think of a bus/seat pair as a fraction, \((b,s) \equiv \frac{b}{s}\) we see that every positive rational number has its own room within the natural numbers. In fact, they have infinitely many rooms, since, for example, \[ \frac{1}{1} = \frac{2}{2} = \frac{3}{3} = \frac{4}{4} = \ldots \] all get rooms (but they're the same rational number!).
We often denote a set by using braces, e.g. \(S=\{1,2,3\}\) is the set of the first three natural numbers.
We say that \(a\) is an element of \(S\) if \(a\) is contained in \(S\), and we write \(a \in S\). So \(1 \in S\), \(2 \in S\), and \(3 \in S\). We deny that an object is in \(S\) this way: \(4 \notin S\).
And if the sets are finite, the proper subset is always smaller, but if the set is infinite, we may actually be able to throw away elements of a set and not change the size of the set!
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(We know that since each row of Pascal's triangle adds to a power of 2.)
This property holds true for all finite sets -- and it turns out to be true for infinite sets, too!
Here's a silly video to illustrate how the power set grows with sets of increasing size. (Thanks to Dr. Towanna Roller (Asbury University) and her daughter Kristyn Roller (UK) for this one!)
And the power set of that set is bigger yet, and so on forever, forever, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
That symbol that you've been familiar with for all your lives, $\infty$: you thought it stood for a single thing; but it stands for a whole collection of monstrously big things, all too big to really think about properly. (Well, Cantor did!:)
"I love you more than the power set of your set of infinite love."
Amen!