Alphabeta Math
False statementConstruction: AI-adaptedVerification: AI-generatedSession-authored (Fable 5 assisted)precheck passjudge pass (z-ai/glm-5.2)verified 2026-07-26 (claude-opus-5)
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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 R\mathbb{R} has a supremum

Statement

False claim: every subset SRS \subseteq \mathbb{R} has a supremum in R\mathbb{R}.

The least-upper-bound property of R\mathbb{R} (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)) carries two hypotheses, that SS is nonempty and that SS 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 R\mathbb{R}, the empty subset R\emptyset \subseteq \mathbb{R}, and the set A:={n1R:n1}A := \{\, n \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}} : n \ge 1 \,\} of canonical naturals of R\mathbb{R}.

[L1]

Least upper bound: ww is a supremum of XX when ww is an upper bound of XX and www \le w' for every upper bound ww' of XX; the least-upper-bound property asserts the existence of such a ww only for XX that is nonempty AND bounded above (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).

[L2]

Archimedean property: R\mathbb{R} is Archimedean, so for every xRx \in \mathbb{R} there is a natural n1n \ge 1 with x<n1Rx < n \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}} (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean).

[L3]

Order: 0<10 < 1; trichotomy holds, so aba \le b and b<ab < a 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

technique · direct
1.1

Every real number ww is an upper bound of \emptyset: the requirement "xwx \le w for all xx \in \emptyset" quantifies over no elements and so holds vacuously. In particular \emptyset is bounded above.

L1
1.2

The set AA is a nonempty subset of R\mathbb{R}, since 11R=1RA1 \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}} = 1_{\mathbb{R}} \in A.

given
2.1

The empty set has no least upper bound: were ww one, then 0<10 < 1 gives w1<ww - 1 < w, while w1w - 1 is an upper bound of \emptyset, so leastness of ww would force ww1w \le w - 1 and hence, adding 1w1 - w to both sides, 101 \le 0, which contradicts 0<10 < 1 by trichotomy. So the first witness \emptyset has no supremum although it is bounded above.

step 1.1L1L3
2.2

The set AA has no upper bound whatsoever: given any xRx \in \mathbb{R}, the Archimedean property produces n1n \ge 1 with x<n1Rx < n \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}}, and n1RAn \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}} \in A, so by trichotomy n1Rxn \cdot 1_{\mathbb{R}} \le x fails and xx does not bound AA above. A supremum is in particular an upper bound, so the second witness AA has no supremum although it is nonempty.

step 1.2L1L2L3
3.1

Each witness refutes the claim on its own, and they refute it for different reasons: \emptyset is bounded above but not nonempty, while AA 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.

step 2.1step 2.2L1

Remarks

  • The two failures are of genuinely different types. For \emptyset the set of upper bounds is all of R\mathbb{R}, which is nonempty but has no least element; for AA 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 AA is exactly the Archimedean property (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean) and so is a theorem about R\mathbb{R}, 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 sup=\sup \emptyset = -\infty and supA=+\sup A = +\infty. This library does not adopt that convention; see Conventions: sup\sup \emptyset, 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