Tuesday 11 December 2007

order theory - Ordering of tuples equivalent to mapping to R?

I'm not sure what the point of taking tuples is, since all you seem to care about is the cardinality of the set of tuples (which is the same as the cardinality of the reals).



If you're asking whether every total ordering on a set with the cardinality of the reals is order-isomorphic to the usual ordering on a subset of the reals, the answer is no. In the reals, there can be at most countably many disjoint intervals, but that's not true in the long line.



If you're asking whether tuples with the lexicographic total order are order-isomorphic to a subset of the reals, the answer is again no, even for 2-tuples, for the same reason: the 2-tuples have uncountably many disjoint intervals of the form (a,b)-(a,c) (with b < c).



As for "I'm not really sure what area of maths this is": order theory.

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