Tag Archives: set

Blog, Examples

Learn Math Through Set Relations

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This is an image of a script I wrote to help users understand mathematics through set theory and relations.

I have just finished a script that helps users understand mathematics through set theory and relations.

Much of our world deals with relationships – both in the sense of romantic ones or ones that show some interesting property between two sets. When mathematicians think of set theory, a relation between the set A and the set B is a set of ordered pairs, where the first element of the ordered pair is from the set A and the second element of the ordered pair id from the set B. So if we say that R is a relation on the sets A and B, that would mean that R consists of elements that look like (a, b) where a is in A and b is in B. Another way of writing this is that R is a subset of A x B. For more on subsets and cross product, I refer you to my earlier script work on set operations.

Relations can provide a useful means of relating an abstract concept to a real world one. I think of things like the QB rating system in the NFL as an example. We have a set of all quarterbacks in the NFL (or really all people who have thrown a pass) and we would like some means of saying that one QB is performing better than another. The set of statistics kept on a QB is a large set, so attempting to show that one QB is better by showing that every year that they played one is better in every statistical category can be (a) exhaustive, and (b) will lead to very few interesting comparisons. Most of the really good QBs have some areas that they are really good and others that they are not. The QB rating system provides a relation between the set of all QBs in the NFL and the set of real numbers. Once this relation was defined, we can say that one QB is performing better than another if his QB rating is higher. Similarly we can compare a QB to his own statistics at different points in his career to see the changes and trends.

This is just one example, and there are countless others that I could have used instead.

Once we understand what a relation is, we have several properties that we are interested in. Below I list four, although there are many more.

Properties of Relations:
A relation R is symmetric if whenever an element (a, b) belongs to R, then so does (b, a).

A relation R is reflexive if for every element a in the universe of the relation, the element (a, a) belongs to R.

A relation R is transitive if for every pair of elements (a, b) and (c, d) and b = c, then the element (a, d) belongs to R.

A relation R is anti-symmetric if the elements (a, b) and (b, a) do not belong to the relation whenever a is not equal to b.

Once we understand what a relation is, there are a few common ones that we are interested in. Below I list four, but again, I want to stress that these are some of the more common ones, but there are several others.

Types of Relations:
A relation R is a function (on its set of defined elements) if there do not exist elements (a, b) and (a, c) which both belong to R.

A relation R is an equivalence relation if R is symmetric, reflexive and transitive.

A relation R is a partial order set if R is anti-symmetric, reflexive and transitive.

A relation R is a total order set if it is a partial order set and for every pair of elements a and b, either (a, b) is in R or (b, a) is in R.

A partial order is just an ordering, but not everything can be compared to everything else. Think about the Olympics, and a sport like gymnastics. Consider the floor and the balance beam. One person can win gold on the floor and another person wins gold on the balance beam. That puts each of them in the “top” of the order for their particular section, but there’s no way of comparing the person who won the floor exercise to the person who won the balance beam. So we say the set is “partially ordered”. More formally, lets say that two people (person X and person Y) relate if they competed in the same event and the the first person (in this case person X) received an equal or higher medal in that event than the second person (in this case person Y). Obviously any person receives the same medal as themselves, so this relation is reflexive. And if Jamie received an equal or higher medal than Bobby and Bobby received an equal or higher medal than Chris, then Jamie must have received an equal or higher medal than Chris so this relation is transitive. To test this relation for anti-symmetry, suppose that Chuck received an equal or higher medal than Charlie and Charlie received an equal or higher medal than Chuck. This means that they must have received the same medal, but since only one medal is awarded at each color for each event (meaning one gold, one silver and one bronze…if this is not true, assume it is), this must mean that Chuck and Charlie are the same person, and this relation is thus anti-symmetric.

If we have a partial ordering where we can compare everything, then we say that the set is “totally ordered”.

An equivalence relation tries to mimic equality on our relation. So, staying with that example of the Olympics, an example of an equivalence relation could be to say that two athletes relate to one another if they both received the same color medal in their event (for the sake of argument lets assume that no athlete competes in more than one event). Then obviously an athlete receives the same medal as themselves, so this relation is reflexive. If two people received the same medal, then it doesn’t matter if we say Chris and Charlie or Charlie and Chris, so the relation is symmetric. And Finally if Chris received the same medal as Charlie an if Charlie received the same medal as Jesse, then all three people received the same medals, so Chris and Jesse received the same medals and this relation is transitive. Because this relation has these three properties, it is called an equivalence relation.

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How Could You Possibly Love/Hate Math?

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Growing up, I never really liked math. I saw it as one of those necessary evils of school. People always told me that if I wanted to do well and get into college, I needed to do well in math. So I took the courses required of a high school student, but I remember feeling utter confusion from being in those classes. My key problem was my inquisitive nature. I really didn’t like being “told” that certain things were true in math (I felt this way in most classes). I hated just memorizing stuff, or memorizing it incorrectly, and getting poor grades because I couldn’t regurgitate information precise enough. If this stuff was in fact “true”, I wanted to understand why. It seemed like so much was told to us without any explanation, that its hard to expect anybody to just buy into it. But that’s what teachers expected. And I was sent to the principal’s office a number of times for what they called “disturbing class”, but I’d just call it asking questions.

At the same time, I was taking a debate class. This class was quite the opposite of my math classes, or really any other class I’d ever had. We were introduced to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, etc. The list goes on and on. We discussed theories, and spoke of how these concepts could be used to support or reject various propositions. Although these philosophies were quite complex, what I loved was the inquiries we were allowed to make into understanding the various positions. Several classmates and I would sit and point out apparent paradoxes in the theories. We’d ask about them and sometimes find that others (more famous than us) had pointed out the same paradoxes and other things that seemed like paradoxes could be resolved with a deeper understanding of the philosophy.

Hate is a strong word, but I remember feeling that mathematicians were inferior to computer programmers because “all math could be programmed”. This was based on the number of formulas I had learned through high school and I remember having a similar feeling through my early years of college. But things changed when I took a course called Set Theory. Last year, I wrote a piece that somewhat describes this change:

They Do Exist!

Let me tell you a story about when I was a kid
See, I was confused and here's what I did.
I said "irrational number, what’s that supposed to mean?
Infinite decimal, no pattern? Nah, can't be what it seems."
So I dismissed them and called the teacher wrong.
Said they can't exist, so let’s move along.
The sad thing is that nobody seemed to mind.
Or maybe they thought showing me was a waste of time.

Then one teacher said "I can prove they exist to you.
Let me tell you about my friend, the square root of two."
I figured it'd be the same ol' same ol', so I said,
"Trying to show me infinity is like making gold from lead"
So he replies, "Suppose you're right, what would that imply?"
And immediately I thought of calling all my teachers lies.
"What if it can be written in lowest terms, say p over q.
Then if we square both sides we get a fraction for two."

He did a little math and showed that p must be even.
Then he asked, "if q is even, will you start believing?"
I stood, amazed by what he was about to do.
But I responded, "but we don't know anything about q"
He says, "but we do know that p squared is a factor of 4.
And that is equal to 2 q squared, like we said before."
Then he divided by two and suddenly we knew something about q.
He had just shown that q must be even too.

Knowing now that the fraction couldn't be in lowest terms
a rational expression for this number cannot be confirmed.
So I shook his hand and called him a good man.
Because for once I yould finally understand
a concept that I had denied all my life,
a concept that had caused me such strife.
And as I walked away from the teacher's midst,
Excited, I called him an alchemist and exhaled "THEY DO EXIST!"

Aside from its lack of poetic content, I think that many mathematicians can relate to this poem, particularly the ones who go into the field for its theoretic principles. For many of us, Set Theory is somewhat of a “back to the basics” course where we learn what math is really about. The focus is no longer on how well you can memorize a formula. Instead, its more of a philosophy course on mathematics – like an introduction to the theory of mathematics, hence the name Set Theory.

The poem above focuses on a particular frustration of mine, irrational numbers. Early on, we’re asked to believe that these numbers exist, but we’re not given any answers as to why they should exist. The same could be said for a number of similar concepts though – basically, whenever a new concept is introduced, there is a reasonable question of how do we know this is true. This is not just a matter of practicality, but a necessity of mathematics. I mean I could say “lets now consider the set of all numbers for which X + 1 = X + 2”, but if this is true for any X, then it means that 1 equals 2, which we know is not true. So the set I’d be referring to is the empty set. We can still talk about it, but that’s the set I’d be talking about.

So why is this concept of answering the why’s of mathematics ignored, sometimes until a student’s college years? This gives students a false impression of what math really is, which leads to people making statements like “I hate math”, not really knowing what math is about.

Blog, Examples

Learning Math through Set Theory

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In grade school, we’re taught that math is about numbers. When we get to college (the ones of us who are still interested in math), we’re taught that mathematics is about sets, operations on sets and properties of those sets.

Understanding Set Theory is fundamental to understanding advanced mathematics. Iv wrote these scripts so that users could begin to play with the different set operations that are taught in a basic set theory course. Here, the sets are limited to positive integers and we’re only looking at a few operations, in particular the union, intersection, difference, symmetric difference, and cross product of two sets. I will explain what each of these is below.

The union of the sets S1 and S2 is the set S1 [union] S2, which contains the elements that are in S1 or S2 (or in both).
Note: S1 [union] S2 is the same as S2 [union] S1.

The intersection of the sets S1 and S2 is the set S1 [intersect] S2, which contains the elements that are in BOTH S1 and S2.
Note: S1 [intersect] S2 is the same as S2 [intersect] S1.

The difference between the sets S1 and S2 is the set S1 / S2, which contains the elements that are in S1 and not in S2.
. Note. S1 / S2 IS NOT the same as S2 / S1.
Note. S1 / S2 is the same as S1 [intersect] [not]S2.

The symmetric difference between the sets S1 and S2 is the set S1 [symm diff] S2, which contains the elements that are in S1 and not in S2, or the elements that are in S2 and not in S1.
Note. S1 [symm diff] S2 is the same as S2 [symm diff] S1.
Note. S1 [symm diff] S2 is the same as (S1 [intersect] [not] S2) [union] (S2 [intersect] [not] S1).

The cartesian product of the two sets S1 and S2 is the set of all ordered pairs (a, b), where a [in] S1 and b [in] S2.