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.
FALSE: every function of bounded variation is absolutely continuous
Statement
Every function of bounded variation on a compact interval is absolutely continuous.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The statement above.
We refute it with the Cantor function.
Refutation
The Cantor function is nondecreasing by The Cantor function is well defined, satisfies whenever , is surjective onto , and is constant on every interval removed from the Cantor set, so for every partition the variation sum telescopes to . Hence has bounded variation.
Iterating the two affine branches in The Cantor middle-thirds set as the intersection of the sets obtained by removing open middle thirds, the stage- set consists of pairwise disjoint closed intervals indexed by the -digit words in , each of length . Their total length is therefore , which tends to by For the sequence is null, and for the sequence diverges to . For the interval indexed by a word , its endpoints have ternary digits followed respectively by all 's and all 's (The Cantor set is exactly the set of with every , and this gives a bijection with ). The identity on the Cantor set from claim 1 of The Cantor function is well defined, satisfies whenever , is surjective onto , and is constant on every interval removed from the Cantor set, together with the binary-digit formula in The Cantor function on , defined on the Cantor set through ternary digits and extended constantly across each removed interval, therefore gives endpoint increment . Thus the sum of the endpoint increments over the stage- intervals is always . The total input length can be arbitrarily small while this increment sum stays , so fails the defining - condition of Absolute continuity on a compact interval. Hence is not absolutely continuous and the statement is false.
Depends on
- The Cantor function is continuous on $[0,1]$
- Absolute continuity on a compact interval
- Bounded variation and total variation on an interval
- The Cantor function on $[0,1]$, defined on the Cantor set through ternary digits and extended constantly across each removed interval
- The Cantor middle-thirds set as the intersection of the sets $C_n$ obtained by removing open middle thirds
- Nondecreasing, increasing (strictly increasing), nonincreasing, decreasing, monotone and strictly monotone real functions on a subset of $\mathbb{R}$, with the dictionary to monotone sequences
- For $|r| < 1$ the sequence $r^k$ is null, and for $|r| > 1$ the sequence $|r|^k$ diverges to $+\infty$
- The Cantor function is well defined, satisfies $c(x) \le c(y)$ whenever $x \le y$, is surjective onto $[0,1]$, and is constant on every interval removed from the Cantor set
- The Cantor set is exactly the set of $\sum_{k \ge 1} a_k 3^{-k}$ with every $a_k \in \{0,2\}$, and this gives a bijection with $\{0,1\}^{\mathbb{N}}$
Used by
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Dependency tree · two levels
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Sources
- Christopher Heil, Absolute Continuity and the Banach-Zaretsky Theorem (standard reference, not scraped)
- A. M. Bruckner, J. B. Bruckner, and B. S. Thomson, Real Analysis, 2nd ed. (standard reference, not scraped)