hey! it's berry!

 

full-time software developer, part-time cs master's student, free-time languages enthusiast, some-time rhythm game attempter, big-time c++ hater


One of the weirdest Math Facts I've come across is that it's consistent with ZF minus Choice that there exists an equivalence relation ~ on ℝ with more1 equivalence classes than ℝ has elements.

This is super weird, right? Like, the equivalence classes are disjoint and non-empty, right? So getting an injection ℝ/~ → ℝ should be simple, right? For every equivalence class, just pick a represe- oh right we don't have choice.

There's a neat slide deck (Wayback Machine, sadly the original link doesn't work anymore) that goes over the intuition of just how the heck this works.

1: Because of shenanigans like this, cardinality isn't as useful in the absence of choice, so this 'more' is more about dramatic effect than technical correctness.


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