Maths●●●●●Difficulty 3 of 5

Is there a biggest infinity?

Cantor proved that every infinite set has a strictly larger one above it: the staircase of infinities never ends.

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No. For any infinity you can name, there is a strictly larger one, so there is no largest infinity. That is Cantor's theorem, first stated and proved at the end of the 19th century by Georg Cantor.

The recipe for climbing is simple. Take any set, and form the set of all its subsets, called its power set. Cantor showed that the power set always has strictly greater cardinality than the set you started with. His argument applies to any set, finite or infinite. Apply it to the whole numbers, and you get a set that is strictly larger: the real numbers have the cardinality of the power set of the integers, which is strictly larger than the cardinality of the integers. Now take the power set again, and again, and each time you get an infinity strictly larger than the one before. The result is an endless hierarchy of infinite cardinals.

The endless staircase of infinities
  1. Step 1: Whole numbers

  2. Step 2: Their subsets, a strictly larger infinity

  3. Step 3: The subsets of those subsets, larger again

  4. Step 4: And so on forever

The proof is elegant and remarkably simple, and it is a diagonal argument in the same spirit as the one that shows the reals cannot be listed. Suppose you could pair every number with a set of numbers, with nothing left over. Some numbers would be paired with a set that contains them, and Cantor's proof calls these selfish. Others would be paired with a set that does not, and the proof calls these non-selfish. Now gather all the non-selfish numbers into one special set. That set provides the contradiction: no number can be its partner, so the pairing was never complete.

Cantor gave essentially this proof in 1891. It had immediate and important consequences for the philosophy of mathematics, and it also led to a famous problem: if you try to gather everything into one set containing all sets, Cantor's theorem says its power set would be strictly bigger, yet a set of all sets would already contain every one of those subsets. That contradiction is called Cantor's paradox.

Quiz me

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  1. 1.What does Cantor's theorem say about the power set of any set?
  2. 2.In the proof for the natural numbers, which numbers go into the special set?
  3. 3.Why does Cantor's theorem imply there is no largest infinity?

Recap

The set of all subsets of any set is strictly bigger than the set, so infinities never stop growing.

💡 A trick to remember it · Each time you take the set of all subsets, you climb one rung, and the ladder has no top.

Surprising fact · A computer prover finds this simple proof surprisingly hard because it must discover the special set.

Sources (1)

No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (13 claims) cites at least one of these.

  1. [1]Cantor's theorem · Wikipedia
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