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Georg Cantor, c. 1870. Cantor's first set theory article contains Georg Cantor's first theorems of transfinite set theory, which studies infinite sets and their properties. One of these theorems is his "revolutionary discovery" that the set of all real numbers is uncountably, rather than countably, infinite. [1]
Such sets are now called uncountable sets, and the size of infinite sets is treated by the theory of cardinal numbers, which Cantor began. Georg Cantor published this proof in 1891, [1] [2]: 20– [3] but it was not his first proof of the uncountability of the real numbers, which appeared in 1874.
The best known example of an uncountable set is the set of all real numbers; Cantor's diagonal argument shows that this set is uncountable. The diagonalization proof technique can also be used to show that several other sets are uncountable, such as the set of all infinite sequences of natural numbers (see: (sequence A102288 in the OEIS)), and the set of all subsets of the set ...
Thus, the Cantor set is a homogeneous space in the sense that for any two points and in the Cantor set , there exists a homeomorphism : with () =. An explicit construction of h {\displaystyle h} can be described more easily if we see the Cantor set as a product space of countably many copies of the discrete space { 0 , 1 } {\displaystyle \{0,1\}} .
All subsets of a set S (all possible choices of its elements) form the power set P(S). Georg Cantor proved that the power set is always larger than the set, i.e., |P(S)| > |S|. A special case of Cantor's theorem is that the set of all real numbers R cannot be enumerated by natural numbers, that is, R is uncountable: |R| > |N|.
In the 1870s, Georg Cantor started to develop set theory and, in 1874, published a paper proving that the algebraic numbers could be put in one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers, and thus that the set of transcendental numbers must be uncountable. [16] Later, in 1891, Cantor used his more familiar diagonal argument to prove ...
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (/ ˈ k æ n t ɔːr / KAN-tor; German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfɛʁdinant ˈluːtvɪç ˈfiːlɪp ˈkantoːɐ̯]; 3 March [O.S. 19 February] 1845 – 6 January 1918 [1]) was a mathematician who played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics.
So Cantor's argument implies that the set of all subsets of N has greater cardinality than N. The set of all subsets of N is denoted by P(N), the power set of N. Cantor generalized his argument to an arbitrary set A and the set consisting of all functions from A to {0, 1}. [4]