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.
in , and no supremum in
Example
Let be the canonical embedding of the rationals as an ordered subfield of (The unique embedding of ℚ into an ordered field) and put Viewed inside , the set has a supremum, namely , the unique nonnegative real whose square is (Square roots exist: a unique with ; the positives are ). Viewed inside , the same set has no supremum at all: it has upper bounds in , but none of them is least.
This is the reason exists. The rationals form an ordered field in which a perfectly ordinary bounded set fails to have a least upper bound, because the number that ought to be that bound is irrational (FALSE: some rational number squares to 2). The least-upper-bound property (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)) is precisely the repair, and the value it supplies here is .
The order-theoretic defect exhibited below is the exact counterpart of the metric defect recorded in FALSE: the rationals are complete, where a Cauchy sequence of rationals fails to have a rational limit. The two are different statements about the same hole in , and this library repairs it twice, once by Dedekind cuts and once by Cauchy sequences.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The complete ordered field , the canonical embedding , the abbreviation in each of the two fields, and the set , regarded as a subset of and, through , as the subset of . "Upper bound of in " means an element with for every , and "supremum of in " means such a that is every upper bound of in .
Square roots: every in has a unique with (Square roots exist: a unique with ; the positives are ).
Squaring is strictly monotone on the nonnegatives: for in one has if and only if (Squaring is monotone on the nonnegatives).
The embedding: is the unique field homomorphism ; it is injective and order preserving, so , , and implies . It also reflects the order: if then , since would give by order preservation and injectivity, contradicting trichotomy (The unique embedding of ℚ into an ordered field, Ordered field).
Density: is Archimedean, being a complete ordered field, and its rationals are dense in it, so for in there is with (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean, Archimedean ordered field, ℚ is dense in every Archimedean ordered field).
The claim that there exists with is false (FALSE: some rational number squares to 2).
Epsilon characterisation of the supremum: for a nonempty bounded above and an upper bound of , one has if and only if for every there is with (Epsilon characterisation of the supremum).
Every set of two reals has a maximum, which is one of the two entries and dominates both (Every nonempty finite set of reals has a maximum and a minimum, Maximum and minimum of a set).
Order and least upper bounds: , hence in both fields; trichotomy holds, so the negation of is ; the order is transitive; adding a constant preserves it; multiplication distributes over addition, so ; for every , so (Multiplication by zero: ); and a least upper bound is an upper bound that is every upper bound (The multiplicative identity is positive, Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities, Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property), Ordered field, Field).
Verification
In we have , so [L1] supplies a unique with ; and because would give , so . Write .
is nonempty: the rational satisfies and , so .
Let be an arbitrary upper bound of in , that is, for every .
Let in be arbitrary.
The rational is an upper bound of in , so is bounded above there: for order preservation gives and , whence by [L2] and by order reflection.
is an upper bound of in : for order preservation gives and , so by [L2], hence .
is not the image of any rational: if then , so by injectivity of , which [L5] forbids.
Put , which exists by [L7]; then , and because is one of the two entries and , of which the first is by 1.1 and the second is because .
The image of the bound is an upper bound of in : for the inequality in gives by order preservation.
Density applied to produces a rational with ; then forces by order reflection, and gives by [L2], hence in ; so and .
The set is nonempty and bounded above in by , and for every its element satisfies ; the epsilon characterisation therefore gives .
Since is the least upper bound of and is an upper bound of it, we get ; and by 2.2, so .
Density applied to produces a rational with ; every satisfies , so by order reflection and is an upper bound of in ; and , again by order reflection. Hence is not every upper bound of in , so is not a supremum of in .
The upper bound was an arbitrary one, so no upper bound of in is least: has a supremum in , equal to , and has no supremum in even though it is nonempty and bounded above there, for instance by .
Remarks
- The set is bounded above in , by , as step 1.5 checks. Both hypotheses of the least-upper-bound property are therefore satisfied inside , and the conclusion still fails. The property is a genuine assumption about the field, not a consequence of the order axioms alone.
- The proof of leastness uses density twice, once to find an element of close below and once to squeeze a rational between and a putative rational least upper bound. Both uses go through ℚ is dense in every Archimedean ordered field, which is itself a consequence of the Archimedean property (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean).
- The same argument runs with replaced by any positive rational that is not the square of a rational, once its two numerical steps are readjusted: step 1.2 must exhibit a positive rational whose square lies below , and step 1.5 a positive rational whose square lies above it, neither of which is the constant or in general. Both exist for every positive rational , and uniformly, so nothing here depends on being convenient: take and , both positive rationals. Then , since is equivalent to and hence, dividing by , to , which holds because ; and for the same reason. Everything after those two steps is unchanged, so the failure is pervasive rather than a curiosity attached to .
Depends on
- Epsilon characterisation of the supremum
- Square roots exist: a unique $\sqrt{a} \ge 0$ with $(\sqrt{a})^2 = a$; the positives are $\{x^2 : x \neq 0\}$
- FALSE: some rational number squares to 2
- FALSE: the rationals are complete
- The unique embedding of ℚ into an ordered field
- ℚ is dense in every Archimedean ordered field
- Every complete ordered field is Archimedean
- Squaring is monotone on the nonnegatives
- Every nonempty finite set of reals has a maximum and a minimum
- Maximum and minimum of a set
- Archimedean ordered field
- Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)
- Ordered field
- Field
- The multiplicative identity is positive
- Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities
- Multiplication by zero: $0 \cdot a = 0$
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: 67 results over 22 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
- Least-upper-bound property (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Square root of 2 (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- W. Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd ed., Ch. 1 (standard reference, not scraped)
- T. Tao, Analysis I, 3rd ed. (standard reference, not scraped)
- MIT 18.100A, Complete Lecture Notes (standard reference, not scraped)
- John K. Hunter, An Introduction to Real Analysis (standard reference, not scraped)