Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/iii/paper-121/4/d/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 121 4 d Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
A witness to failure of the Axiom of power set is . Every subset belongs to , since its transitive closure has cardinality at most . If some were the internal power set of , transitivity and bounded subsethood would force to contain every ambient subset of , and only those subsets. Thus it would be the full .
By the Cantor theorem,Its transitive closure contains all its members, so . This contradicts . ThereforeThe power-set failure in hereditarily small sets needs no assumption about the Continuum hypothesis.
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