Are there more rectangles than squares

cardinalscomplex numberselementary-set-theoryreal numbers

My son just asked me a question that I thought was pretty good. He asked, "Are there more rectangles than squares?"

He's 13 and very good at math. For instance, we've talked about how there are more real numbers than integers and seems to understand.

My question is the reverse of this question, I think:

Do the real numbers and the complex numbers have the same cardinality?

So it would seem that there is the same number of rectangles as squares. But it's very strange, since we know that squares are a subset of rectangles.

Any thoughts?

Best Answer

It depends. Two answers have pointed out that, as far as cardinality goes, the set of squares has the same cardinality as the set of rectangles. But there are other ways to look at the question.

For example, if you know where two opposite vertices of the square are, then you know the square. But a rectangle is not determined by two vertices – you have to know three vertices to determine a rectangle. So in a sense (and it can be made a quite precise sense), the set of all squares is a two-dimensional object, while the set of all rectangles is a three-dimensional object, and in that sense the set of all rectangles is a bigger object. It's like the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional ball; surface and ball have the same cardinality, but ball has the bigger dimension.

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