Paper 4, Section II, E

Numbers and Sets
Part IA, 2015

(i) Let \sim be an equivalence relation on a set XX. What is an equivalence class of \sim ? What is a partition of X?X ? Prove that the equivalence classes of \sim form a partition of XX.

(ii) Let \sim be the relation on the natural numbers N={1,2,3,}\mathbb{N}=\{1,2,3, \ldots\} defined by

mna,bN such that m divides na and n divides mb.m \sim n \Longleftrightarrow \exists a, b \in \mathbb{N} \text { such that } m \text { divides } n^{a} \text { and } n \text { divides } m^{b} .

Show that \sim is an equivalence relation, and show that it has infinitely many equivalence classes, all but one of which are infinite.