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Suppose $A$ and $B$ are unequal sets, and the set $E$ is empty.

Suppose $f:E \rightarrow A$, and $g:E \rightarrow B$ are (the unique) functions.

Must $f \neq g$?

This is essentially the same question Are all empty maps the same?.

Rebooting since such a fundamental question should have a clear answer or at least widely discussed answer, and I do not wish to mislead my students.

I wish to construct a set theory so that sets and the functions between them form a category, and it looks to me like $f \neq g$. Is this correct?

amWhy
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    I think it is the same question. If you feel that the answers there don't have a clear unambiguous resolution (and I I sympathize; they don't) you should specify in more detail what information you need to resolve the question and why specifically you think it wasn't resolve. Just repeating a question isn't going to help. (For what its worth, I rather like the accepted answer on the page.) – fleablood Jan 17 '25 at 20:20
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    If you are using a material set theory like ZFC as your foundation of mathematics, then there are two common, yet distinct, ways of defining what a function is. Which definition you are using affects the answer to your question. See this answer for more details. – Joe Jan 17 '25 at 20:29
  • Thanks! Google search AI, is getting it wrong today, insisting that all empty functions are equal, Rebooted independently this question before realizing it's essentially an exact duplicate. Grateful for the help, maybe the questions and answers can be merged? – Paul Fabel Jan 17 '25 at 21:10
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    LLMs should mostly not be trusted on these kinds of questions. If you have to ask an LLM a math question ask an o1 model, o1-mini or full o1 if you have access through GPT. – Qiaochu Yuan Jan 17 '25 at 21:12

1 Answers1

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They are not equal. Part of the definition of equality of functions should be that they have the same domain and codomain. That is, functions $f : X \to Y$ and $g : Z \to W$ are equal iff $X = Z, Y = W$, and $f(x) = g(x)$ for all $x \in X = Z$.

As discussed in the link, this is not the definition of equality you get if you think of functions $f : X \to Y$ in terms of their graphs $\Gamma_f \subset X \times Y$, since any two empty functions have the same graph (the empty subset of the empty set). But you don't have to do that, and you shouldn't. From a category-theoretic point of view it simply does not make sense to ask whether two morphisms in a category are equal unless they have the same source and target. And when we pass from the graph of a function to the function itself, it's not enough just to know the graph as a subset of the set $X \times Y$; we also have to know what the two coordinate projections $\pi_X : X \times Y \to X$ and $\pi_Y : X \times Y \to Y$ are, in order to know what values the function takes. This is extra data, and for empty functions with different codomains this extra data is different. (Of course for empty functions $\pi_Y : \emptyset \times Y = \emptyset \to Y$ is just the original function again, so this is a bit circular. But this at least shows that the graph argument is not decisive.)

Here is an additional consideration which may be persuasive. An isomorphism between two morphisms $f : X \to Y$ and $g : Z \to W$ (in the arrow category of some category) is a pair of isomorphisms $h_1 : X \cong Z$ and $h_2 : Y \cong W$ such that $h_2 \circ f = g \circ h_1$. Whatever equality of functions ought to mean it should surely be the case that functions that are equal are isomorphic. But two empty functions with non-isomorphic domains are not isomorphic.

Qiaochu Yuan
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