Tuesday, March 12, 2013

10.1, due on March 13

I found this statement to be very interesting: "Certainly, then, understanding infinite sets was not
an easy task, even among well-known mathematicians of the past."  I almost find this humorous.  If some of the most brilliant mathematical minds had difficulty understanding infinite sets, how in the world do I have a chance at all understanding them?  I laughed a little thinking about that.  Specifically, I didn't really understand "There can be a one-to-one correspondence between a set and a proper subset of the set" and how it relates to infinite sets.  It troubled Galileo, so I guess my lack of understanding should not trouble me too much.

Numerically equivalent sets, from what I read, seem to be tied to concepts learned in Chapters 8 and 9, so I am comfortable with this.  The description involving two sets A and B having the same cardinality if they're empty or if there is a bijective function from A to B.  Learning about bijective functions already really makes this easier to grasp.  Once again, I feel that the text and the course is well-organized and the principles learned build off one another nicely.

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