The American Mathematical Monthly

ISSN: 0002-9890 (Print) 1930-0972 (Online) Journal homepage: https://tandfonline.com/loi/uamm20

Bijections between (0, 1), (0, 1], and [0, 1]

Alfred Witkowski

To cite this article: Alfred Witkowski (2020) Bijections between (0, 1), (0, 1], and [0, 1], The
American Mathematical Monthly, 127:2, 139-139, DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2020.1684788

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00029890.2020.1684788

Published online: 06 Jan 2020.

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 Bijections between (0, 1), (0, 1], and [0, 1]
The most common way to show that the interval (0, 1) and the intervals (0, 1]
or [0, 1] are of the same cardinality is to construct a bijection (0, 1) → (0, 1] in the
following manner: choose a countable subset {a1 , a2 , a3 , . . . } of (0, 1) and shift it to
{1, a1 , a2 , . . . }, leaving all other points of the interval intact. A similar construction
can be made for the closed interval.
A question students often ask is: Can one produce a formula for such a function?
The intention behind such a question is to avoid functions defined piecewise and get
the formula to be as simple as possible. The intuitive answer is “no.” Formulas gener-
ally describe continuous functions and Darboux teaches us that continuous bijections
between the three types of sets cannot exist. Fortunately (or unfortunately) this time
the intuition fails.
We shall give two formulas that establish one-to-one correspondences between
(0, 1) and (0, 1] of quite different character.
The first one comes from the simple observation that
∞ 
  ∞ 
 
(0, 1) = n+1 , n
1 1
and (0, 1] = n+1 , n
1 1
.
n=1 n=1
   
n+1 , n → n+1 , n
1 1 1 1
The simplest bijective mapping is given by the formula
fn (x) = 1
n+1+ 1
n − x and it is only a matter of minutes to convert all of them into
one formula,

1 1
f (x) =  +  − x,
x −1 x −1 − 1

that defines the bijection between (0, 1) and (0, 1].

Now we demonstrate how to produce a formula
describing

the algorithm shown
at the beginning of this note. The function cos2 π x is the characteristic function

of the set of integers, so cos2 (π log2 x) is the characteristic function of the set
P = {2n : n ∈ Z}. Therefore the function
  
g(x) = x 1 + cos2 (π log2 x)

is the identity on R+ \ P and doubles the elements of P ; thus it maps the interval
(0, 1) onto (0, 1]. To obtain a bijection between (0, 1) and [0, 1] it is enough to iterate
g and make sure that 1/2 gets mapped to 0 like this:
 
h(x) = x + (3x − 22x) cos2 (π log2 x) .

—Submitted by Alfred Witkowski,

UTP University of Science and Technology, Bydgoszcz, Poland
doi.org/10.1080/00029890.2020.1684788
MSC: Primary 03E20, Secondary 26A03, 97A80

February 2020] 139