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Cantor's theorem and its proof are closely related to two paradoxes of set theory. Cantor's paradox is the name given to a contradiction following from Cantor's theorem together with the assumption that there is a set containing all sets, the universal set. In order to distinguish this paradox from the next one discussed below, it is important ...
An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets. The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above. An infinite set may have the same cardinality as a proper subset of itself, as the depicted bijection f(x)=2x from the natural to the even numbers demonstrates ...
This fact is a direct consequence of Cantor's theorem on the cardinality of the power set of a set. Proof: Assume the contrary, and let C be the largest cardinal number. Then (in the von Neumann formulation of cardinality) C is a set and therefore has a power set 2 C which, by Cantor's theorem, has cardinality strictly larger than C .
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 ]
Cantor gave two proofs that the cardinality of the set of integers is strictly smaller than that of the set of real numbers (see Cantor's first uncountability proof and Cantor's diagonal argument). His proofs, however, give no indication of the extent to which the cardinality of the integers is less than that of the real numbers.
However, Cantor's theorem proves that there are uncountable sets. The root of this seeming paradox is that the countability or noncountability of a set is not always absolute, but can depend on the model in which the cardinality is measured. It is possible for a set to be uncountable in one model of set theory but countable in a larger model ...
Cantor defined cardinality in terms of bijective functions: two sets have the same cardinality if, and only if, there exists a bijective function between them. Between any two real numbers a < b , no matter how close they are to each other, there are always infinitely many other real numbers, and Cantor showed that they are as many as those ...
Cantor's diagonal argument shows that is strictly greater than , but it does not specify whether it is the least cardinal greater than (that is, ).Indeed the assumption that = is the well-known Continuum Hypothesis, which was shown to be consistent with the standard ZFC axioms for set theory by Kurt Gödel and to be independent of it by Paul Cohen.