Skip to main content
2 of 2
added 98 characters in body
Christian Stump
  • 3.3k
  • 1
  • 20
  • 29

My suggestion has quite some overlap with other comments and also @gowers answer:

Let $A$, $B$ be two sets. An explicit bijection between $A$ and $B$ is a deterministic algorithm taking elements of $A$ as input and for which outputs are elements of $B$, such that an analysis of the algorithm yield its bijectivity.

Several notes:

  • In most cases I have been looking at, the sets $A$ and $B$ were finite.

  • A typical way of satisfying this criterion is to provide two deterministic algorithms $A \to B$ and $B \to A$ and showing that they are inverses of each other. Or showing that both are injective. I would also call this "explicit" though one might need to slightly reword to include this situation.

  • I did not include anything about complexity of the algorithm because I do not think its actual computation time is relevant for it being "explicit".

  • I have often seen the following relaxation, namely that one knows already that $|A| = |B|$, and only deduces injectivity or surjectivity from the algorithm. The problem with this relaxation is that it would allow just listing the elements of both sets...

Christian Stump
  • 3.3k
  • 1
  • 20
  • 29