Paper 4, Section II, E

Numbers and Sets | Part IA, 2015

(i) Let ∼\sim be an equivalence relation on a set XX. What is an equivalence class of ∼\sim ? What is a partition of X?X ? Prove that the equivalence classes of ∼\sim form a partition of XX.

(ii) Let ∼\sim be the relation on the natural numbers N={1,2,3,…}\mathbb{N}=\{1,2,3, \ldots\} defined by

m∼n⟺∃a,b∈N such that m divides na and n divides mb.m \sim n \Longleftrightarrow \exists a, b \in \mathbb{N} \text { such that } m \text { divides } n^{a} \text { and } n \text { divides } m^{b} .

Show that ∼\sim is an equivalence relation, and show that it has infinitely many equivalence classes, all but one of which are infinite.

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