Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Set of subsets of naturals with inclusion order [Solution]

The goal was to find an uncountable set $S$ such that each member of $S$ was a subset of the naturals, and given any two elements $A, B \in S$, either $A \subset B$ or $B \subset A$.

Solution

Consider the rationals in $[0, 1]$ which are countable, say $\{q_1, q_2, \dots\}$

For each real $x \in [0, 1]$ let $S_x = \{i : q_i \le x\}$.

$S = \{S_x : x \in [0, 1]\}$ is a set with that property.

3 comments:

  1. For each natural number n and real number x in (0, 1), map (n, x) to {1,2,...,n}. The resulting sets have duplicates though.

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    1. Yeah, the only sets you have are {1}, {1,2}, {1,2,3}, ... which is countable.

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