English

Amorphous sets and dual Dedekind finiteness

Logic 2025-10-16 v1

Abstract

A set AA is dually Dedekind finite if every surjection from AA onto AA is injective; otherwise, AA is dually Dedekind infinite. An amorphous set is an infinite set that cannot be partitioned into two infinite subsets. A strictly amorphous set is an amorphous set in which every partition has only finitely many non-singleton blocks. It is proved consistent with ZF\mathsf{ZF} (i.e., the Zermelo--Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of choice) that there exists an amorphous set AA whose power set P(A)\mathscr{P}(A) is dually Dedekind infinite, which gives a negative solution to a question proposed by Truss [J. Truss, Fund. Math. 84, 187--208 (1974)]. Nevertheless, we prove in ZF\mathsf{ZF} that, for all strictly amorphous sets AA and all natural numbers nn, P(A)n\mathscr{P}(A)^n is dually Dedekind finite, which generalizes a result of Goldstern.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.13508,
  title  = {Amorphous sets and dual Dedekind finiteness},
  author = {Yifan Hu and Ruihuan Mao and Guozhen Shen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13508},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:38:52.211Z