Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In his controversial 1878 paper, Cantor explicitly defined the notion of "power" of sets and used it to prove that the set of all natural numbers and the set of all rational numbers are equinumerous (an example where a proper subset of an infinite set is equinumerous to the original set), and that the Cartesian product of even a ...
Let be the set of ordered pairs of integers (,) with non-zero , and define an equivalence relation on such that (,) (,) if and only if =, then the equivalence class of the pair (,) can be identified with the rational number /, and this equivalence relation and its equivalence classes can be used to give a formal definition of the set of ...
The set of rational numbers is not complete. For example, the sequence (1; 1.4; 1.41; 1.414; 1.4142; 1.41421; ...), where each term adds a digit of the decimal expansion of the positive square root of 2, is Cauchy but it does not converge to a rational number (in the real numbers, in contrast, it converges to the positive square root of 2).
In the case of fractions of integers, the fractions a / b with a and b coprime and b > 0 are often taken as uniquely determined representatives for their equivalent fractions, which are considered to be the same rational number. This way the fractions of integers make up the field of the rational numbers.
The set of all rational numbers, also referred to as "the rationals", [2] the field of rationals [3] or the field of rational numbers is usually denoted by boldface Q, or blackboard bold . A rational number is a real number .
The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by rational numbers. For this problem, a rational number p/q is a "good" approximation of a real number α if the absolute value of the difference between p/q and α may not decrease if p/q is replaced by another
In the case of the rational numbers this means that any number has two irreducible fractions, related by a change of sign of both numerator and denominator; this ambiguity can be removed by requiring the denominator to be positive. In the case of rational functions the denominator could similarly be required to be a monic polynomial. [8]
Also, the real numbers form an ordered field, in which sums and products of positive numbers are also positive. Moreover, the ordering of the real numbers is total, and the real numbers have the least upper bound property: Every nonempty subset of that has an upper bound has a least upper bound that is also a real number.