The equivalence relation is defined on a set of 9 elements and is negatively transitive relation. How many equivalence classes can be there?

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I looked for answers a lot but mostly used the Bell number, which we haven't studied. And I have no idea how to do it with negatively transitive relations..

(Edit) Negatively transitive relation, according to our lecturer:

R is negatively transitive if and only if:

∀x,y,z∈S:¬(xRy)∧¬(yRz)⟹¬(xRz)

By De Morgan's Laws, this can be given the alternative form:

∀x,y,z∈S:(xRz)⟹(xRy)∨(yRz)

(Also a note that we don't study this in English, so there might be some mistakes in the explanation, I'm sorry for this)

I tried to count all possible relations for 9 elements first, which was 2^18, and then tried to find the partitions of a set (the equivalence relations on the set). For 9 elements was hard, but for 3 elements it was:

First possible partition: {{a},{b},{c}}:3 classes, each class with 1 element.

2 nd possible partition: {{a,b},{c}}2 classes, one with elements a,b and the other with c .

Similarly we see three other possible partitions: {{a},{b,c}},{{a,c},{b}} , and {{a,b,c}} .

(Source: How many different equivalent relations can you define on set of three elements?)

And the answer was 5 equivalent relations.

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You counted the equivalence relations (which correspond to partitions) but you never took into account the "negatively transitive" property.

For example, consider the equivalence relation corresponding to the partition $\{\{a,b\},\{c\}\}$. This is not "negatively transitive": because we have $aRb$, so therefore by the definition of negatively transitive, we must have either $aRc$ or $cRb$, but we have neither.

In fact, if $R$ is an equivalence relation that is also "negatively transitive", then it must be the total relation (everything is related to everything)!

Why?

Well, let $a$ and $b$ be any elements of the set. Because $R$ is reflexive, we know that $aRa$ holds. Since $R$ is negatively transitive, we have $$aRa\implies aRb \vee bRa.$$ But because $R$ is symmetric, $bRa\implies aRb$ anyway. Therefore, we conclude that $aRb$ holds.

Since $a$ and $b$ were arbitrary elements, it follows that $R$ is the total relation.

That means that there is exactly one equivalence class.