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Exercise [16.07]
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Joined: 26 Mar 2010, 04:39
Posts: 109
Exercise [16.07]
We wish to define a way of ordering the fractions. We can do this by consider the fractions as the ordered pairs , such that , and with the equivalence for any .

In Exercise 16.8 we found a 1-1 mapping . Thus there exists a well-defined inverse function .

We first construct the sequence via:

Note that we needed to include the negative values because the fractions take both positive and negative values. Now we edit the sequence to remove duplicates and values which do not represent fractions. Namely we go through the sequence term by term starting from . If or for some then we delete the term. Otherwise we leave it in, identifying with the fraction .

After relabelling indices, this provides a new sequence which defines an ordering for the fractions.

15 May 2010, 08:27

Joined: 12 Jul 2010, 07:44
Posts: 154
Re: Exercise [16.07]
An even easier way is just to order fractions first by (|numerator|+denominator) and then by numerator (assuming the denominator is always positive; i.e. the sequence that begins:

0/1; -1/1, 0/2, 1/1; -2/1, -1/2, 0/3, ....

You still need to then go through and form the final sequence by removing all fractions that aren't in their simplest form, though. (e.g. 5/10 -> 1/2, so 5/10 gets removed, etc.).

03 Apr 2011, 05:40
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