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7: Infinite Sets

  • Page ID
    48254
    • Eric Lehman, F. Thomson Leighton, & Alberty R. Meyer
    • Google and Massachusetts Institute of Technology via MIT OpenCourseWare

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    This chapter is about infinite sets and some challenges in proving things about them.

    Wait a minute! Why bring up infinity in a Mathematics for Computer Science text? After all, any data set in a computer is limited by the size of the computer’s memory, and there is a bound on the possible size of computer memory, for the simple reason that the universe is (or at least appears to be) bounded. So why not stick with finite sets of some large, but bounded, size? This is a good question, but let’s see if we can persuade you that dealing with infinite sets is inevitable.

    You may not have noticed, but up to now you’ve already accepted the routine use of the integers, the rationals and irrationals, and sequences of them—infinite sets, all. Further, do you really want Physics or the other sciences to give up the real numbers on the grounds that only a bounded number of bounded measurements can be made in a bounded universe? It’s pretty convincing—and a lot simpler—to ignore such big and uncertain bounds (the universe seems to be getting bigger all the time) and accept theories using real numbers.

    Likewise in computer science, it’s implausible to think that writing a program to add nonnegative integers with up to as many digits as, say, the stars in the sky— billions of galaxies each with billions of stars—would be different from writing a program that would add any two integers, no matter how many digits they had. The same is true in designing a compiler: it’s neither useful nor sensible to make use of the fact that in a bounded universe, only a bounded number of programs will ever be compiled.

    Infinite sets also provide a nice setting to practice proof methods, because it’s harder to sneak in unjustified steps under the guise of intuition. And there has been a truly astonishing outcome of studying infinite sets. Their study led to the discovery of fundamental, logical limits on what computers can possibly do. For example, in Section 7.2, we’ll use reasoning developed for infinite sets to prove that it’s impossible to have a perfect type-checker for a programming language.

    So in this chapter, we ask you to bite the bullet and start learning to cope with infinity.


    This page titled 7: Infinite Sets is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Eric Lehman, F. Thomson Leighton, & Alberty R. Meyer (MIT OpenCourseWare) .

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