All natural numbers are interesting
Theorem: All natural numbers are interesting.1
Proof by contradiction.
Assume the theorem is false. Then there must be at least one number that is boring.
Let be the set of boring numbers.
By the assumption, we have:
Thus, because is non-empty , the Well Ordering Principle tells us that:
Thus this is the smallest boring natural number in existence; which makes interesting. A contradiction! ∎
Note that the same doesn’t trivially hold for the set of real numbers since you’d first have to prove that the set of boring real numbers is either finite or bounded, and that the infimum is a member of the set. Neither does this hold for since a non-finite subset in doesn’t necessarily have a minimum.
-
Not actually a theorem.↩︎
Last modified: August 3, 2022