Assignment 3 SC/MATH 1190 A (Fall 2023)

Part (a) Due Wednesday, October 4, at 1:30 pm

Part (a): Pre-reading Due Wednesday, October 4, at 1:30 pm

Answers for this assignment need to be submitted via Crowdmark. If provided with a textbox please
submit a short text answer: graphical answers, including pdfs, may not be graded when a textbox is
provided.
It was already recommended for last week’s reading that you skim sections 2.1–2.4. Our discussion this
week will continue to follow those sections, but you should additionally skim section 2.5. One of our
primary goals of this discussion is to get to the point where we can appreciate one of the key ideas to come
out of 19th Century mathematics, namely the fact that it is possible for one infinite set to be larger than
another infinite set.
Key points to pay attention to this week include:

• Section 2.3 (Functions). A functions pairs each element of one set, the domain, with an element
of a second set, the codomain. Our study of functions will have two main themes.

– We will discuss abstract properties of functions. The most important classification describes
special ways that a function might interact with its codomain.
(a) An injection is a function that only uses each element of the codomain at most once. These
are the functions that can be ‘unapplied’.
(b) A surjection is a function that visits every element of the codomain at least once.
These two concepts give an abstraction of the two principles of counting you’ve learned since
kindergarten: to count things correctly, you need to count everything at least once (surjections
do this), and you cannot count anything more than once (injections do this). A function with
both special properties is called a bijection, and it is only bijections that have compositional
inverses (think of the relation between the exponential function and logarithm function).
The reason we need these ideas (in the context of this course) is primarily so that we can discuss
cardinalies of infinite sets in section 2.5 when we come back from reading week. If you skim
that section now, then it should help you to understand how these ideas will fit together.
Note that most functions are not special, in the sense that none of these terms apply, and as a
result most functions cannot be used to compare the cardinalities of sets.
– We will also discuss some concrete properties of functions, and see in particular how algebraic
operations like addition and multiplication can be applied to functions instead of numbers. This
idea of performing algebra with functions will be extended with the ideas of composition and
inversion, which are specific to functions. We will also look at, and begin using, some functions
like floor, ceiling, and factorial that you might not have encountered in high school.

• Section 2.4 (Sequences and Summations). Functions with domain N or Z+ are special enough
that we often using a different notation for dealing with them. We will refer to such a function as
a sequence, and will examine several common kinds of structured sequences, including arithmetic
sequences and geometric sequences. We will revisit many examples of this section as we learn about
induction (Chapter 5).
• Section 2.5 (Cardinalities of Sets). By defining the cardinalities of sets in terms of injections and
surjections, we will gain the ability to discuss cardinalities of infinite sets. Several operations that
increase the size of finite sets have no consequence to the cardinality of infinite sets, so for example
N, Z, Z × Z, and Q have the same cardinality. It is not true, however, that every infinite set has the
same cardinality, since R and the interval (0, 1) are strictly bigger.

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782
(a) Write the improper fraction, 13 , as a mixed fraction.

(b) If you use the division algorithm to divide 782 by 13, what are the quotient and the remainder?

(c) Evaluate ⌊ 782

Question A2:
To motivate several of the concepts of functions and sequences, we will use an extended example involving
a puzzle that was popularized last year. The original puzzle appears at
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-you-salvage-your-rug/
with an adapted version reproduced below.

A 12×9 grid consists of 108 squares. Removing 8 squares from the middle leaves 100 (left).
This is the same as the number of squares in a 10×10 grid (right).
Challenge: Cut the shape on the left into as few pieces as you can, so that the pieces can be
rearranged into the shape on the right. Hint: It is easy to do with 4 pieces, but the puzzle
can be solved with fewer than 4 pieces, and they don’t even need to be rotated.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70
67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90
83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Note that any solution to the puzzle moves each square on the left onto a square on the right, and by keeping
track of where each square ends up, you could define a bijection from {1, 2, 3, . . . , 100} to {1, 2, 3, . . . , 100}.

(a) What is 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10?

(b) Let f (n) = 2 + 4 + 6 + · · · + 2n be the sum of the first n even positive integers. Part (a), for example,
deals with f (5). Find a formula for f (n) based on the discussion in section 2.4.


(c) Use your formula to compute 2 × f (4) + f (5) .

Bonus What does this have to do with the problem of rearranging the squares in our grids?

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Please prepare long-form answers to each question in this part of the assignment.

Question B1:
This question provides a simple example where case analysis is useful. Our goal is to conclude that the
polynomial functions 15n2 + 11n + 2 is even whenver n is an integer.

(a) Compute 15 × 72 + 11 × 7 + 2 and 15 × 42 + 11 × 4 + 2 and check that both are even numbers.
Note: These examples do not prove our claim, but working with small examples can help us to check
that a claim is reasonable, before we proceed with an abstract investigation.
(b) Use multiplication to check that 15n2 + 11n + 2 = (3n + 1)(5n + 2).
(c) We will now show that if n is even, then 15n2 + 11n + 2 is even, practicing rules of inference along
the way.
(i) Show that if 5n + 2 is even, then 15n2 + 11n + 2 is even.
Note: You should be interpreting this is the quantified statement ∀n(5n + 2 is even) → (15n2 +
11n + 2) is even). Your goal is to use universal generalization, so you do not get to work with
any specific value of n. It is sufficient to work with the fact that 5n+2 = 2k for some k, together
with the factorization from (a).
(ii) Use a direct proof to show that if n is even, then 5n + 2 is even.
Again, this is to be interpretted as a universally quantified statement, so you do not get to pick
any particular value of n.
(iii) Use hypothetical syllogism to conclude from (i) and (ii) that if n is even, then 15n2 + 11n + 2
is even.
(d) Prove that if n is odd, then 15n2 + 11n + 2 is even.
Hint: You can model your proof on (c), but start by showing that if n is odd, then 3n + 1 is even.
(e) Write a proof by cases that combines (c)(iii) and (d) to conclude that if n is an integer, then
15n2 + 11n + 2 is even.

Question B2:
This question gives practice with the idea of modifying an existing proof to create a new one. Consider
the following proof of the AM-GM property.
If x and y are both positive real numbers, then (x − y)2 ≥ 0, since the square of any real number is
non-negative. By expanding the left side, and adding 4xy to both sides of the inequality, we see that
x2 + 2xy + y 2 ≥ 4xy. The left side of this inequality is a perfect square, since (x + y)2 = x2 + 2xy + y 2 .
√
We can apply the square root function to both sides of the inequality, to conclude that x + y ≥ 4xy.
√
Dividing both sides of this expression by 2 proves that x+y 2 ≥ xy.

(a) Suppose that we have the slightly stronger hypothesis that y is a positive real number and x > y.
What does this stronger hypothesis allow us to conclude about x − y and (x − y)2 .
√
(b) Rewrite the proof to incorporate this new hypothesis, and prove that if x > y > 0, then x+y
2 > xy.
(c) We cannot, however, blindly modify a proof. If x = −6 and y = −24, then x+y = −15, but
√ √ √ 2
xy = 144 = 12. In this case x+y 2 < xy. We did not satisfy the part of the hypothesis that
stated that x and y are both positive. The proof must use the fact that x and y are positive at some
point, even though it doesn’t state explicitly that it is relying on that fact. Which step of the proof
uses the fact that x and y are positive?

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