How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
On with for the sets are nested, closed, bounded and complete with empty intersection
Statement refuted
Refuted claim: in Cantor's intersection theorem (In a complete metric space nested nonempty closed sets whose diameters tend to meet in exactly one point, and this property characterises completeness) the hypothesis may be dropped; in a complete metric space a nested sequence of nonempty closed bounded sets has nonempty intersection.
Let (The natural numbers (von Neumann)) and define
where whenever , so the reciprocal is defined. Put . Then is a metric, is complete, every is nonempty, closed, bounded and itself complete, the are nested, and
What fails is only the diameter condition: for every .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: with the function above; the sets ; naturals ; a real .
contains , and for distinct naturals one has , so is a positive real, at most (The natural numbers (von Neumann), Canonical naturals are positive and strictly increasing, Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order).
The metric axioms (M1), (M2), (M3), and nonnegativity (Metric space: iff , symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric, Nonnegativity of a metric is a consequence of the other axioms, not an axiom).
Open sets, balls, Cauchyness and convergence, tested with real (The metric topology: a set is open when every one of its points has a ball around it inside the set; closed means open complement, Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space, Cauchy sequence in a metric space, Convergence of a sequence in a metric space: iff in , The rationals embed densely in the reals).
Bounded subset and diameter: is bounded when it lies in a ball, and for nonempty bounded ; the supremum is the least upper bound (Bounded subset, diameter, distance from a point to a set, and distance between two sets in a metric space, Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property), Maximum and minimum of a set).
Reciprocals reverse order on the positives, and for every real there is a natural with (Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order, For every in a complete ordered field there is a natural with , Every complete ordered field is Archimedean).
A closed subset of a complete metric space is complete (A subspace of a complete metric space is complete iff it is closed, and a complete subspace of any metric space is closed, Complete metric space: every Cauchy sequence converges in the space).
Counterexample
is well defined and symmetric, and exactly when , since for the value is at least . In fact for all , because .
satisfies the triangle inequality . If the left side is ; if or one side of the right-hand sum is and the other equals the left side; and if , , are pairwise distinct then . So is a metric on .
Every subset of is open, hence also closed: for the ball is , since for , so every subset is a union of open balls; complements of subsets are subsets.
is complete: a Cauchy sequence tested at has an index with for all , which by step 1.1 forces ; so the sequence is constant from on and converges to .
Each is bounded: for every , so .
Each is nonempty (it contains ), closed by step 2.2, and complete by [L6]; and , so the family is nested.
. Indeed the distances realised inside are and the values for distinct ; among such pairs is least when , giving , and is largest there. So is an upper bound of those distances and is itself one of them, hence it is the least upper bound.
In particular for every , so the sequence does not converge to : at no index makes the diameters smaller than .
The intersection is empty: for every we have , since ; so no natural lies in all the .
So in the complete metric space the sets are nonempty, closed, bounded, complete and nested, and their intersection is empty; the only hypothesis of In a complete metric space nested nonempty closed sets whose diameters tend to meet in exactly one point, and this property characterises completeness that they fail is , so that hypothesis cannot be dropped.
Remarks
- Indexing. contains here, so is written with and not with or : at those would be undefined or degenerate. The clause is what guarantees , and it is the reason the formula is stated by cases rather than as a single expression.
- The metric is a small perturbation of the discrete metric, taking values in , and its topology is discrete. Every subset is closed, so closedness is free and carries no information; what the example exploits is that a set can be closed, bounded and complete while its points stay a definite distance apart, so a nested family can drain away to nothing.
- Contrast with the real line. On the same sets are nested, nonempty and closed with empty intersection, but they are not bounded, so they are not a Cantor chain either. The present example is sharper: it keeps boundedness and loses only the vanishing of the diameters.
- Both conclusions of the theorem fail here, not just one. There is neither a common point nor a unique one, which is what one expects: the uniqueness half of In a complete metric space nested nonempty closed sets whose diameters tend to meet in exactly one point, and this property characterises completeness is exactly what the vanishing diameters buy.
Depends on
- In a complete metric space nested nonempty closed sets whose diameters tend to $0$ meet in exactly one point, and this property characterises completeness
- Metric space: $d(x,y) = 0$ iff $x = y$, symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric
- Complete metric space: every Cauchy sequence converges in the space
- Bounded subset, diameter, distance from a point to a set, and distance between two sets in a metric space
- For every $\varepsilon > 0$ in a complete ordered field there is a natural $n \ge 1$ with $1/n < \varepsilon$
- Every complete ordered field is Archimedean
- Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order
- The metric topology: a set is open when every one of its points has a ball around it inside the set; closed means open complement
- Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space
- Cauchy sequence in a metric space
- The natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$ (von Neumann)
- Canonical naturals are positive and strictly increasing
- Convergence of a sequence in a metric space: $x_k \to x$ iff $d(x_k, x) \to 0$ in $\mathbb{R}$
- A subspace of a complete metric space is complete iff it is closed, and a complete subspace of any metric space is closed
- Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)
- The rationals embed densely in the reals
- Maximum and minimum of a set
- Nonnegativity of a metric is a consequence of the other axioms, not an axiom
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 110 results over 31 levels. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, and this result sits at the bottom with a heavier outline. Click the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Cantor's intersection theorem (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Complete metric space (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)