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 subset of has a supremum
Statement
False claim: every subset has a supremum in .
The least-upper-bound property of (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)) carries two hypotheses, that is nonempty and that is bounded above, and neither may be dropped. Two independent witnesses are given below, one failing each hypothesis on its own.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The complete ordered field , the empty subset , and the set of canonical naturals of .
Least upper bound: is a supremum of when is an upper bound of and for every upper bound of ; the least-upper-bound property asserts the existence of such a only for that is nonempty AND bounded above (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).
Archimedean property: is Archimedean, so for every there is a natural with (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean).
Order: ; trichotomy holds, so and cannot both be true; and adding a constant preserves the order (The multiplicative identity is positive, Ordered field, Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities).
Refutation
Every real number is an upper bound of : the requirement " for all " quantifies over no elements and so holds vacuously. In particular is bounded above.
The set is a nonempty subset of , since .
The empty set has no least upper bound: were one, then gives , while is an upper bound of , so leastness of would force and hence, adding to both sides, , which contradicts by trichotomy. So the first witness has no supremum although it is bounded above.
The set has no upper bound whatsoever: given any , the Archimedean property produces with , and , so by trichotomy fails and does not bound above. A supremum is in particular an upper bound, so the second witness has no supremum although it is nonempty.
Each witness refutes the claim on its own, and they refute it for different reasons: is bounded above but not nonempty, while is nonempty but not bounded above. So the claim is false, and moreover neither hypothesis of the least-upper-bound property can be dropped, since each fails alone on one of these two sets.
Remarks
- The two failures are of genuinely different types. For the set of upper bounds is all of , which is nonempty but has no least element; for the set of upper bounds is empty. Only one witness would therefore leave the impression that a single hypothesis is doing all the work.
- The failure for is exactly the Archimedean property (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean) and so is a theorem about , not an accident of the chosen set: in a non-Archimedean ordered field the canonical naturals can be bounded above (Not every ordered field is Archimedean).
- Some texts repair the statement by working in the extended reals, where and . This library does not adopt that convention; see Conventions: , unbounded sets, and the extended reals.
Depends on
Used by
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 9 results over 6 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)
- Archimedean property (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- W. Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd ed., Ch. 1 (standard reference, not scraped)
- John K. Hunter, An Introduction to Real Analysis (standard reference, not scraped)
- MIT 18.100A, Complete Lecture Notes (standard reference, not scraped)