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Nested intervals plus the Archimedean property imply Bolzano-Weierstrass, by repeated bisection
Statement
Let be an ordered field that is Archimedean (Archimedean ordered field) and has the nested interval property (NIP) of The five completeness properties of an ordered field: least upper bound, monotone convergence, nested intervals, Bolzano-Weierstrass, and Cauchy completeness. Then has the Bolzano-Weierstrass property (BW): every bounded sequence in has a subsequence converging in .
Say that a set is cofinal when for every there is with . The construction below bisects a bracketing interval, keeping at each stage a half that the sequence visits cofinally often, and reads the limit off (NIP).
Facts & Assumptions
Given: An Archimedean ordered field with (NIP), and a bounded sequence in , so that for every and some .
Sequences in an ordered field: boundedness, for , nesting, lengths tending to in , convergence in , and subsequences along a strictly increasing index map (Sequences, convergence, Cauchyness, monotonicity, boundedness and closed intervals in an arbitrary ordered field).
Archimedean property: for every there is a natural number with (Archimedean ordered field); and the canonical naturals satisfy for and whenever (Canonical naturals are positive and strictly increasing).
Recursion theorem (The recursion theorem).
Well-ordering principle: every nonempty subset of has a least element (The well-ordering principle).
Consecutive comparisons suffice for strict increase: if for every then is strictly increasing (A strictly increasing index map satisfies ).
Powers and Bernoulli: and (Integer powers ); and for (Bernoulli's inequality ).
Order arithmetic: (The multiplicative identity is positive); adding a constant preserves the strict order and strict inequalities add (Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities), the nonstrict forms following with the equality cases; gives , and gives (Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order); the order is total and transitive and sums and products of positives are positive (Ordered field).
Absolute value: , and equals or , so whenever both and (Basic properties of the absolute value).
Induction principle (The principle of mathematical induction) and totality of the order on ( is a linear order on ).
Proof
Since , the element satisfies and for every , so and for every .
Writing , define by when and the set of with is cofinal, and otherwise; the recursion theorem applied to , the element and gives a unique with and , and we write and .
By induction on , all of the following hold: ; ; ; and the set is cofinal. For this is step 1.1 together with and . For the step, put , so that and ; if the first clause of applies then has the four properties by construction, and otherwise there is with for all , so every in the cofinal set has and hence lies in , which is therefore cofinal as well.
The lengths tend to in : given , the element is positive, so [L3] supplies with , and then for every Bernoulli at gives , whence and .
Since each is cofinal, for every and every the set is nonempty and so has a least element; the recursion theorem applied to , the element and the map sending to therefore yields indices and .
The sequence is nested with lengths tending to , so (NIP) supplies an element lying in for every .
Since for every , the map is strictly increasing and is a subsequence of ; moreover for every , the case being from step 1.1.
For every , both and lie in , so and , whence .
Given in , step 3.1 supplies with for all , so for all ; hence in .
An arbitrary bounded sequence in has therefore been given a subsequence converging in , so has (BW).
Remarks
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No choice is used. Both recursions are applications of The recursion theorem to functions defined outright: the bisection rule keeps the left half exactly when that half is visited cofinally often, and the index is the least admissible one, supplied by The well-ordering principle rather than chosen.
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Where each hypothesis enters. (NIP) is used once, at step 4.1. The Archimedean property is used once, at step 3.1, and only to know that the halved lengths get below every positive element of . Without it the bisection still runs and still produces nested intervals, but their lengths need not tend to in , and (NIP) as stated would not apply.
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The bracketing interval is widened by in step 1.1 so that even when the sequence is identically ; the argument of step 3.1 divides by and would otherwise have to treat that case separately.
Depends on
- The five completeness properties of an ordered field: least upper bound, monotone convergence, nested intervals, Bolzano-Weierstrass, and Cauchy completeness
- Sequences, convergence, Cauchyness, monotonicity, boundedness and closed intervals in an arbitrary ordered field
- Archimedean ordered field
- The recursion theorem
- The well-ordering principle
- A strictly increasing index map satisfies $n_k \ge k$
- Integer powers $a^m$
- Bernoulli's inequality $(1+x)^n \ge 1 + nx$
- Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order
- Canonical naturals are positive and strictly increasing
- The multiplicative identity is positive
- Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities
- Basic properties of the absolute value
- The principle of mathematical induction
- $\le$ is a linear order on $\mathbb{N}$
- Ordered field
Used by
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Sources
- J. F. Hall, Completeness of Ordered Fields (standard reference, not scraped)
- Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Nested intervals (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- W. Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd ed., Ch. 3 (standard reference, not scraped)