this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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[–] wieson@feddit.org 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Natural numbers < whole numbers < rational numbers < real numbers

Okay, to clarify, I mean the "is partial set of" instead of "is smaller than".

Your saying it would be correct for "whole numbers" and "decimal numbers". But that's exactly what OP said "natural" and "real"

[–] themagzuz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

actually you can show that the naturals, integers and rationals all have the the same size.
for example, to show that there are as many naturals as integers (which you do by making a 1-to-1 mapping (more specifically a bijection, i.e. every natural maps to a unique integer and every integer maps to a unique natural) between them), you can say that every natural, n, maps to (n+1)/2 if it is odd and -n/2 if it is even. so 0 and 1 map to themselves, 2 maps to -1, 3 maps to 2, 4 maps to -2, and so on. this maps every natural number to an integer, and vice-versa. therefore, the cardinality (size) of the naturals and the integers are the same.

you can do something similar for the rationals (if you want to try your hand at proving this yourself, it can be made a lot easier by noting that if you can find a function that maps every natural to a unique rational (an injection), and another function that maps every rational to a unique natural, you can use those construct a bijection between the naturals and rationals. this is called the schröder-bernstein theorem).

it turns out that you cannot do this kind of mapping between the naturals (or any other set of that cardinality) and the reals. i won't recite it here, but cantor's diagonal argument is a quite elegant proof of this fact.

now, this raises a question: is there anything between the naturals (and friends) and the reals? it turns out that we don't actually know. this is called the continuum hypothesis

[–] wieson@feddit.org 2 points 18 hours ago

I clarified my above comment

[–] Fleur_@aussie.zone 0 points 16 hours ago

You can't count the decimals, op is counting the decimals and insisting that they are more of those counted decimals than in the integers. This inherently doesn't make sense and is improper use of what infinities are and what they can represent.