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Hm, I'm not so sure that just because the definition of a bijection is technical that it is not intuitive.

I'll start an enumeration of the rationals

1 1/3

2 1/4

3 1/5

...

If you can prove that you can do this, is that really so non-colloquial? It is certainly what we mean by "as many" for all finite sets, so what is wrong with doing this for infinitely many sets?




If every whole positive number is a fraction, but not every fraction is a whole positive number, then colloquially, I wouldn't define them as having "as many" elements as each other. Now, if you want to say they have the same cardinality (and you define cardinality as existing a bijection), then I would agree fully.


Wouldn't there be exactly twice (or twice + 1, if you allow negative fractions) as much fractions, since fractions are represented as two positive numbers (plus a bit if you consider the sign).

(The encoding could be "represent both numbers in binary, put the denominator in the odd bits (LSB = first bit), and the numerator in the even bits" so 2/3 => 10/11 => 1110 => 14)


The thing is that you could also use this kind of logic to show that there are more natural numbers than there are natural numbers. For example, you could associate 1 with all of the numbers from 1 to one million, and still have enough numnbers 'left' to associate each of 2,3,... with distinct natural numbers above one million.


What's worse, there are an infinite number of fractions that equal each whole number.




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