Umm... part of the proof omitted, I will put it in later tonight. Reason being that it's part of an assignment, and the deadline is today, so I don't want to do anything dodgy...
Okay.
Proof of convergent/divergent series...
I'm taking out the bits of Analysis that have been relevant so far. Most of them are also accessible on the website for MATH3610 on
http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/ForStudents/courses/math3610/index.shtml, I highly recommend you have at least chapter 1 open when you read this. (eg I really am too lazy to reproduce Cantor's argument, it's really nice tho.. go read that bit if nothing else)
Preliminary defns: |A|<=|B| for infinite sets means that there is a 1-1 (or onto) function from A to B ie one that doesn't have two function values equalling the same thing in B.
Countable: Can put in bijection with N. equivalent to "can put in a list containing every member"
In higher analysis I we proved that N^N (N being natural numbers, and if you take N^2 as pairs of ordered numbers, N^N is all sequences of natural numbers) is countable ie |N^N|=|N| and you can put it in a list as you can N.
(this is the bit I'll put up say a little later. It's an interesting exercise, not that easy though..)
Anyway, back to the question. The set of all series would then be R^N. By Cantor's diagonalisation argument, R is not countable (ie infinity of R is a step higher than infinity of N). It's quite easy to prove that if a subset of set X is not countable then X is not countable either. Therefore as R is uncountable, R^N is not countable either (take the n-tuple (x,0,0,0,0,....) which is basically same as R, and a subset of R^N... skipping a few slight definitonal problems here to save time)
BUT you can show that |R^N|=|R|. So the cardinality of a subset of R^N, ie set of divergent series (call this D) or convergent (call C) is at most that of R. (|D|<=|R|)
But now consider the first element of the series in D. By a function which takes a sequence (x_1, x_2,...) to the number x_1, f then has range all real numbers. Hence we have a one-to-one function f going to R, and so D must have cardinality at least that of R. (|D|>=|R|)
Taking the previous 2 facts, it would be obvious for finite sets that |D|=|R|, but actually you need a hard-to-prove (so I'm told) theorem to conclude that. Nevertheless it's true.
Hence you can find a bijection from D to R.
Similarly |C|=|R|, so there is a bijection from C to R and hence 1 from C to D (just put 2 bijections together).
Notice that divergence/convergence doesn't ultimately matter as we just take the first term