Countability.ppt

Countability B.1 Countable and Uncountable Sets B.2 Losets and Q B.3 Some More Advanced Set Theory B.3.1 The Cardinality Ordering B.3.2 The Well-Ordering Principle B.4 Application : Ordinal Utility Theory B.4.1 Preference Relation B.4.2 Utility Representation of Complete Preference Relations B.4.3 Utility Representation of Incomplete Preference Relations B.1 Countable and Uncountable Sets Proposition 1. Every subset of a countable set is countable. Proposition 2. A countable union of countable sets is countable Corollary 1. (Cantor) Q is countable. Proposition 3. Let I be a set of nondegenerate intervals in R such that |I ∩ J| ≤ 1for any I, J ∈ I. Then I is countable. Proposition 4. (Cantor) R is uncountable. B.2 Losets and Q B.3 Some More Advanced Set Theory B.3.1 The Cardinality Ordering B.3.2 The Well-Ordering Principle B.4 Application : Ordinal Utility Theory B.4.1 Preference Relation * * DEFINATIONA set X is called countably infinite if there exists a bijection f that maps X onto the set N of natural numbers. X is called countable if it is either finite or countably infinite. X is called uncountable if it is not countable.So, quite intuitively, we can “count” the members of a countable set just like we could count the natural numbers. An infinite set like X = {x1, x2, ...} is thuscountable, for we can put the members of X into one-to-one correspondence with thenatural numbers:x1 ←→ 1 x2 ←→ 2 · · · xm ←→ m · ·· Proof: Let X be a countable set, and take any subset S of X. If S is finite, there is nothing to prove, so say |S| = ∞. Then X must be countably infinite, and thus we can enumerate it as X = {x1, x2, ...}. Now define the self-map f on N inductively as follows: f(1) = min{i ∈ N : xi ∈ S}f(2) = min{i ∈ N : i f(1) and xi ∈ S}f(3) = min{i ∈ N : i f(2) and xi ∈ S}............(So xf(1) is the first term of the sequence (x1, x2, ...) that belongs to S, xf(2) is the second, an