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.
Supremum of a sumset:
Statement
Let be nonempty and bounded above, and write . Then is nonempty and bounded above, and
Facts & Assumptions
Given: Nonempty sets , both bounded above, and the sumset .
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).
Order and addition: strict inequalities translate and add, that is implies , and together with gives (claims 1 and 2 of Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities). Adjoining the case of equality, in which both sides move by the same amount, gives the nonstrict forms used below: implies , and together with gives .
Supremum and the least-upper-bound property: means is an upper bound of with for every upper bound of , and every nonempty bounded above has such a (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).
Halving: (The multiplicative identity is positive); the positives are closed under addition, so , and by trichotomy a positive element is nonzero, so (axioms O2 and O1 of Ordered field); hence exists (Field) and (Multiplication by zero: ); and for the positive multiplier one has if and only if (claim 4 of Sign rules for products and monotonicity of multiplication).
Proof
Both and are nonempty and bounded above, so the least-upper-bound property supplies and , upper bounds of and of respectively.
The sumset is nonempty: picking and , which is possible since both sets are nonempty, gives .
For and we have and , and adding these inequalities gives ; since every element of has this form, is an upper bound of , so is bounded above.
Let and put , so that and ; from and we get , so the epsilon characterisation applied to with and to with produces with and with , and adding these strict inequalities gives , an element of .
The set is nonempty and bounded above, so exists.
Now is an upper bound of and for every some element of exceeds , so the epsilon characterisation applied to gives .
Remarks
- The inequality is the easy half and needs only that bounds ; the content is the reverse inequality, and the halving of is what lets two separate approximations be combined without overshooting.
- The corresponding statement for infima, for nonempty bounded below, follows by reflection (Reflection through zero exchanges upper and lower bounds, Every nonempty set bounded below has an infimum), since .
- No analogue holds for products in general: sign changes break the argument, and is not determined by and alone.
Depends on
- Epsilon characterisation of the supremum
- Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities
- Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)
- The multiplicative identity is positive
- Sign rules for products and monotonicity of multiplication
- Field
- Ordered field
- Multiplication by zero: $0 \cdot a = 0$
Used by
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 12 results over 5 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
- Infimum and supremum (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)
- Peter J. Olver, Continuous Calculus (standard reference, not scraped)