Thursday 24 March 2011

I've been missing.

Ok so since my university work has ramped up - I've had little time for blogging/let alone myself; thus the absence of interesting updates.

Hopefully, when my assignments are done I shall devote my time to making some more thought provoking posts.

But for now I'll leave you to ponder Russel's Paradox



Pre-reading: The following assumes that you are all familiar with a set, if not then put simply;
A set is a collection of objects.
Generally there will be a rule discerning whether an object is included in a set or not. for example;
A set of all shoe brands does not have colgate as a member (since colgate is a toothpaste brand).

The members of a set can also be sets themselves, for example;
The set of all forks is a member of the set of all cutlery.

Now make a proposal;
Let F be the set of all forks, F itself is not a fork therefore F does not contain itself as a member.
We can call F as a normal set.


Now suppose we have a set NF - this is the set of all things that are not forks. NF itself is not a fork, therefore it contains itself as a member. We can call NF an abnormal set.


Suppose we have a new set G - with all of its elements normal sets. Now, if G is normal then it should contain itself as a member - but the instant it contains itself, G becomes abnormal.


This is known as Russel's Paradox.

6 comments:

  1. I was getting worried you had vanished into the vast depths of the internet. Will you be posting mathematical related material again soon?

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  2. love a good paradox Adam cheers

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  3. Hey man I've started an Anatomy Mnemonics blog,

    check it out for some learning and some laughs

    http://mnemonicanatomy.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. http://www.somethingofthatilk.com/comics/41.jpg

    ReplyDelete