Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 ia Paper 4 8E Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
A set is countable if it admits an injective function into , equivalently if it is finite or can be listed in a sequence. The empty set is included; an infinite countable set has a bijection with .
Every rational number has a representation with and . For each , there are only finitely many such pairs with . List these finite levels successively, ordering each level by , and discard repeated fractions when they first recur. Every rational number appears in some finite level, proving .
For the uncountability proof, suppose all numbers in could be listed as . Choose each decimal expansion not to end in an infinite string of nines, and denote its th digit by . Set when , and otherwise. Then the decimaldefines a number in with a unique such expansion, since its digits are only and . It differs from at digit for every , contradicting the enumeration. This Cantor diagonal argument proves because its subset already is.
For the union of two countable sets , take injective functions and . The mapis injective: it is injective within each branch, and their images have different parity. Thus , regardless of overlap.
The property of says that both and its complement are dense subsets of the real line. Both possible cardinalities occur. To establish the needed density directly, given and , choose an integer . Then is rational and differs from by less than . For an irrational approximation, choose a rational within of and a positive integer large enough that . The number is irrational and lies within of ; irrationality follows from that of , since otherwise subtracting and multiplying by would make rational. To recall the latter fact, a reduced fraction would satisfy , forcing even and then even, contrary to coprimality. ThereforeThe second set is uncountable because, if it were countable, its union with would make countable. The same two density arguments give the required approximations from and from its complement in either example.
Finally, the condition on makes every one of its points an isolated point, so is a discrete subset of the real line. Enumerate all rational intervals with ; enumerate pairs of indices of the rational list by increasing sum and keep those whose endpoints have the required order. For each , its isolating neighbourhood contains a rational interval containing and no other point of . Assign to the least such index . Two distinct points cannot receive the same index, because that interval would then contain two members of . This gives an injective function and proves that discrete subsets of the real line are countable:Using the least index makes the assignment explicit and requires no arbitrary selection of an uncountable family of intervals.