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.
With the discrete metric for , a space is compact iff it is totally bounded iff it is finite, and it is complete whatever its size
Example
Let be a set and define by when and when : the discrete metric on . Then:
- is a metric (Metric space: iff , symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric), for and for (Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space), and every subset of is both open and closed (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).
- is complete (Complete metric space: every Cauchy sequence converges in the space), whatever is: a Cauchy sequence in it is eventually constant.
- The following are equivalent: is compact (Open cover, subcover, compact metric space, and compact subset of a metric space); is totally bounded (Finite -net and totally bounded metric space); is finite (Finite, countably infinite, countable, uncountable).
So the discrete metric separates the two halves of "complete and totally bounded": it is always complete, and it is totally bounded only in the trivial case.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A set and the discrete metric on it, with for and otherwise.
A metric satisfies (M1) exactly when , (M2) symmetry, (M3) the triangle inequality (Metric space: iff , symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric).
; a set is open when every point of it has a ball around it inside it, and closed when its complement is open (Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space, 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).
is Cauchy when for every rational there is with for ; it converges to when for every rational there is with for ; the space is complete when every Cauchy sequence converges in it (Cauchy sequence in a metric space, Convergence of a sequence in a metric space: iff in , Complete metric space: every Cauchy sequence converges in the space).
is compact when every family of open subsets with union has a finite subfamily with union ; a finite set is empty or listable as (Open cover, subcover, compact metric space, and compact subset of a metric space, Finite, countably infinite, countable, uncountable).
A finite -net is a finite with , and total boundedness asks for one at every real (Finite -net and totally bounded metric space).
A compact metric space is totally bounded (A compact metric space is complete and totally bounded, and neither implication uses any choice principle).
A function with domain a natural number all of whose values are nonempty sets has a choice function, in ZF (Every natural-number-indexed list of nonempty sets has a choice function on its family of values).
Verification
is a metric: (M1) holds by definition; (M2) because the condition is symmetric; and (M3) because is or , and when it is one has , so differs from at least one of and and .
For , forces and , so ; for every has , so . Hence every is open, each having , and every subset is closed as well, its complement being open: claim 1.
Claim 2: let be Cauchy and take with for ; then , that is , for every , so for and every rational , and .
For claim 3, suppose is finite. If then the empty subfamily of any family covers it; otherwise list , let be a family of open sets with union , and note that for each the set is nonempty, so finite choice supplies with ; their union contains every and hence is . So is compact.
If is compact it is totally bounded.
If is totally bounded, take a finite -net ; then by step 2.1, so is finite.
Steps 3.1, 4.1 and 5.1 close the cycle finite compact totally bounded finite, so the three conditions of claim 3 are equivalent.
Remarks
This is the standard witness for two of the false statements of the A page. Taking gives a bounded space that is not totally bounded (FALSE: a bounded metric space is totally bounded, with the discrete metric is bounded and is not totally bounded) and a closed bounded subset of a metric space that is not compact (FALSE: a closed and bounded subset of a metric space is compact).
Completeness is not what compactness adds. Claim 2 holds for every , including infinite ones, so completeness alone is very far from compactness. What the discrete metric lacks is total boundedness, and by For a metric space, compact, countably compact, limit point compact, sequentially compact, and complete together with totally bounded are all equivalent, given countable choice and dependent choice it is exactly the pair of conditions that is equivalent to compactness.
Boundedness of the space is unconditional too. Every discrete space is contained in for any of its points, so, for infinite , it is bounded, complete, and not compact all at once (Bounded subset, diameter, distance from a point to a set, and distance between two sets in a metric space).
Depends on
- Metric space: $d(x,y) = 0$ iff $x = y$, symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric
- Open cover, subcover, compact metric space, and compact subset of a metric space
- Finite $\varepsilon$-net and totally bounded metric space
- A compact metric space is complete and totally bounded, and neither implication uses any choice principle
- Complete metric space: every Cauchy sequence converges in the space
- Cauchy sequence in a metric space
- Convergence of a sequence in a metric space: $x_k \to x$ iff $d(x_k, x) \to 0$ in $\mathbb{R}$
- Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space
- 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
- Finite, countably infinite, countable, uncountable
- Every natural-number-indexed list of nonempty sets has a choice function on its family of values
Used by
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 95 results over 19 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
- Discrete space (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Totally bounded space (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)