Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 24 1 b iii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Write and enumerate all nonidentity order automorphisms of the real line as . We construct sets of points to include and exclude, starting with and .
At stage , each of has cardinality less than . Since is a nonidentity increasing bijection, its moved points contain a nonempty open interval. Indeed if , points between and are moved; the other direction is similar. There are therefore moved points. Choose one, , outsideThen put into and into . They are different, and the included and excluded sets remain disjoint. Take unions at limit stages. This recursion works even when is singular: before stage , only countably many initial points and at most chosen pairs have been used.
Let . It is an order-dense subset of cardinality . Any nonidentity order automorphism of extends uniquely to some of , but its value at is the excluded point , a contradiction. Thus the resulting rigid dense subset of the real line satisfies