Further examples of bijections

These examples are meant to aid you in understanding bijections. One has to identify
rst the sets A and B that we are trying to nd a bijection between, then dene a map
f : A B, and then show that f is a bijection to conclude |A| = |B|. To show f is
a bijection, one either writes down an inverse for the function f , or one shows in two
steps that (i) f is injective and (ii) f is surjective. If two sets A and B do not have the
same size, then there exists no bijection between them. It is therefore often convenient
to think of a bijection as a pairing up of the elements of A with the elements of B. In
fact, in a general situation, if |A| = |B| = n, there are n! bijections between A and B.
Example. Give a bijection f from the set of subsets of [5] of size two to the set of
subsets of [5] of size three.
Solution. In this example, A is the set of subsets of [5] of size two and B is the set of
subsets of [5] of size three. The subsets of size two and three are listed below:
A 12 13
B 123 124

14 15
125 134

23
135

24 25
145 234

34 35
235 245

45
345

Here we are writing the sets {1, 2}, {1, 3}, . . ., as 12, 13, . . . to make the notation easier.
So we could dene the bijection f : A B by f (12) = 123, f (13) = 124, f (14) = 125,
and so on following the table above. Note there are many bijections between A and B
many ways of pairing up sets of size two to sets of size three: in fact there are 10!
bijections.
Example. Is it possible to tile a chessboard with dominoes (here each domino covers
two squares of a chessboard)? Is it possible to tile a chessboard with diagonally opposite
squares removed with dominoes?
Solution. The answer is yes to the rst question, because we can for example tile each
column with four vertical dominoes in each column. The answer to the second question
is no: if we could tile the chessboard with corners removed with dominoes, then each
domino would cover one white square and one black square. That means there would be
a bijection from the set of white squares to the black squares. But then there should be
as many white squares as black squares, and that is false because the removed corners
had the same color. What if the chessboard was a 9 9 chessboard? Then what would
the answers to the two above questions be?
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Example. Find a bijection from the positive integers N = {1, 2, 3, . . .} to the integers
Z = {. . . , 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, . . .}.
Solution. In this example, A = N and B = Z. Dene f : N Z by f (x) = (1)x x2 ,
where y denotes the largest integer less than or equal to y (i.e. round y down). Then
f (1) = 0, f (2) = 1, f (3) = 1, f (4) = 2, f (5) = 2, and so on. Now f is a bijection,
since if f (x) = f (y), then (1)x = x2 = (1)y y2 , and so (1)x = (1)y which means
x and y must dier by an even number. But then we need x2 = y2 , and so the only
possibility is x = y. So f is injective. To see that f is surjective, given an integer z, we
must nd an x N such that f (x) = z. Well if z is positive, then f (2z) = z, and if z is
negative then f (2|z| + 1) = z, as required.

Example. Prove that if n is odd, there are as many subsets of [n] of size more than
as subsets of [n] of size less than n2 .

n
2

Solution. Let A be the set of subsets of [n] of size more than n2 and let B be the set of
subsets of [n] of size less than n2 . For each set a A, dene f (a) = [n]\a, i.e. f maps a
set a to the complement of a. Then f is its own inverse, and if a A and f (a) B, so
f : A B is a bijection.
The next example is slightly harder, since we nd a bijection from a set of sequences to
a set of subsets.
Example. Prove that the number of sequences (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) of length k where xi [n]
(
)
and xi > xi1 + 1 for i = 2, 3, . . . , k equals nk+1
.
k
Solution. We dene a bijection f from A, the set of given sequences, to B, the set of
subsets of size k in [n k + 1]. Given (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) A, dene
f (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) = {x1 , x2 1, x3 2, . . . , xk k + 1}.
This maps a sequence in A to a set in B. Note that the set {x1 , x2 1, . . . , xk k + 1} is
a subset of [n k + 1] because xk n and because no two of the elements x1 , x2 1, x3
2, . . . , xk k + 1 are equal by the condition xi > xi1 + 1. For instance if k = 3 then
the sequence (1, 3, 5) gets mapped to {1, 2, 3} and the sequence (1, 4, 6) gets mapped
to {1, 3, 4}. We now have to check that f is a bijection. Suppose (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) and
(y1 , y2 , . . . , yk ) are two sequences in A. If f (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) = f (y1 , y2 , . . . , yk ), then
{x1 , x2 1, x3 2, . . . , xk k + 1} = {y1 , y2 1, y3 2, . . . , yk k + 1}
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and this means x1 = y1 , x2 1 = y2 1, x3 2 = y3 2, and so on. Therefore

x1 = y1 , x2 = y2 , . . . , xk = yk which means (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) = (y1 , y2 , . . . , yk ) i.e. f is
injective. To check that f is surjective, for each set {b1 , b2 , . . . , bk } B where b1 <
b2 < . . . < bk n k + 1, we must nd a sequence (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) A such that
f (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) = {b1 , b2 , . . . , bk }. This means
{x1 , x2 1, x3 2, . . . , xk k + 1} = {b1 , b2 , . . . , bk }.
In other words, x1 = b1 , x2 = b2 + 1, x3 = b3 + 2, . . . , xk = bk + k 1. Now
f (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) = {b1 , b2 , . . . , bk }, and furthermore (x1 , x2 , . . . , xk ) A since xk =
bk + b 1 n and xi = bi + i 1 > bi1 + i 1 = xi1 + 1. So we have checked f is
surjective.