MAT102H5F
Assignment 04 - Fall 2024
Due: Friday, November 8th, 2024 at 11:59pm via Crowdmark.
Late assignments will not be accepted.
Be sure to show and explain all of your work.
Before continuing, ensure that you read the Expectations on Student Writing. Poorly written
assignments, even those whose content is ostensibly correct, will receive a poor mark or a mark
of zero. If you are uncertain as to what qualifies as good writing, do not hesitate to seek out the
advice of a course instructor or teaching assistant.
1. Students in first-year calculus often wish that they could divide by zero. Let’s see what
happens if you were allowed to do that. Suppose that you wanted to extend the real numbers
in a way which allowed you to divide by zero. The first and most obvious way to do this would
be to create a new number, say ∞, which is defined such that 0 · ∞ = 1 (so that 1/0 = ∞).
Define R̂ = R ∪ {∞} to be our new “extended real numbers.”
(a) (3 points) Show that multiplication is not associative in R̂.
(b) (3 points) Show that multiplication is not distributive over addition in R̂.
Note: You do not need to know how ∞ interacts with addition.
2. Instead of our approach in Question 1, we can try a different approach. Let R∗ be the set
of non-zero real numbers. Define a relation ∼ on R × R by saying that (x1 , y1 ) ∼ (x2 , y2 ) if
there exist s1 , s2 ∈ R∗ such that (s1 x1 , s1 y1 ) = (s2 x2 , s2 y2 ).
(a) (2 points) Show that ∼ is an equivalence relation.
(b) (4 points) Let ∼ be as described in part (a). Denote the set of equivalence classes as
R′ , and write equivalence classes as [x, y]. Define 0 = [0, 1] and 1 = [1, 1]. Additionally,
define addition +, multiplication ·, and inversion ⊥ as follows:
[x1 , y1 ] + [x2 , y2 ] = [x1 y2 + x2 y1 , y1 y2 ] (1)
[x1 , y1 ] · [x2 , y2 ] = [x1 x2 , y1 y2 ] (2)
[x1 , y1 ]⊥ = [y1 , x1 ]. (3)
Morally, we’re thinking of [x, y] as the fraction x/y. Notice that (1) behaves exactly as
we would expect fraction addition to work, (2) would be fraction multiplication, and (3)
would be taking reciprocals. In this system, we can now divide by zero freely, since [1, 0]
is a perfectly well-defined object.
However, some of our usual operations have changed. Show that for any x, y, z ∈ R′
i. 0·0=0
ii. (x + 0 · y) · z = x · z + 0 · y
iii. (x + 0 · y)⊥ = x⊥ + 0 · y
iv. x + 0 · 0⊥ = 0 · 0⊥
1
Note: For order of operations, assume that ⊥ has the highest priority, followed by ·, and
finally by +.
(c) (4 points) In Question 1 we lost associativity of multiplication and distributivity when
dealing with R̂. It’s not too hard to convince yourself that multiplication in R′ is asso-
ciative, so now we’ll show that distributivity still holds, though with the same sort of
twist as in part (b). Show that for any x, y, z ∈ R′ we have
i. (x + y) · z + 0 · z = x · z + y · z
ii. x · y ⊥ + z + 0 · y = (x + y · z) · y ⊥ .
3. (4 points) Suppose that F is field. Show that for any elements a1 , . . . , an ∈ F, we have
a1 · a2 · · · an−1 · an = an · an−1 · · · a2 · a1 .
Here you may assume that in the product a1 · a2 · · · an−1 · an , it does not matter in which
order we multiply our elements together, e.g. (((a1 · a2 ) · a3 ) · a4 ) = (a1 · (a2 · (a3 · a4 ))).
