Alphabeta Math
False statementConstruction: AI-adaptedVerification: AI-generatedprecheck passjudge pass (z-ai/glm-5.2)verified 2026-07-26 (claude-opus-5)
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 R has a supremum

Statement

False claim: every subset S⊆R has a supremum in R.

The least-upper-bound property of R (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)) carries two hypotheses, that S is nonempty and that S 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, the empty subset ∅⊆R, and the set A:={ n⋅1R:n≥1 } of canonical naturals of R.

[L1]

Least upper bound: w is a supremum of X when w is an upper bound of X and w≤w′ for every upper bound w′ of X; the least-upper-bound property asserts the existence of such a w only for X that is nonempty AND bounded above (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).

[L2]

Archimedean property: R is Archimedean, so for every x∈R there is a natural n≥1 with x<n⋅1R (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean).

[L3]

Order: 0<1; trichotomy holds, so a≤b and b<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
1.1L1

Every real number w is an upper bound of ∅: the requirement "x≤w for all x∈∅" quantifies over no elements and so holds vacuously. In particular ∅ is bounded above.

1.2given

The set A is a nonempty subset of R, since 1⋅1R=1R∈A.

2.1step 1.1L1L3

The empty set has no least upper bound: were w one, then 0<1 gives w−1<w, while w−1 is an upper bound of ∅, so leastness of w would force w≤w−1 and hence, adding 1−w to both sides, 1≤0, which contradicts 0<1 by trichotomy. So the first witness ∅ has no supremum although it is bounded above.

2.2step 1.2L1L2L3

The set A has no upper bound whatsoever: given any x∈R, the Archimedean property produces n≥1 with x<n⋅1R, and n⋅1R∈A, so by trichotomy n⋅1R≤x fails and x does not bound A above. A supremum is in particular an upper bound, so the second witness A has no supremum although it is nonempty.

3.1step 2.1step 2.2L1∎

Each witness refutes the claim on its own, and they refute it for different reasons: ∅ is bounded above but not nonempty, while A 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 R, which is nonempty but has no least element; for A 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 A is exactly the Archimedean property (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean) and so is a theorem about 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⁡∅=−∞ and sup⁡A=+∞. This library does not adopt that convention; see Conventions: sup⁡∅, unbounded sets, and the extended reals.

Depends on

Dependency tree · 2 levels

Sources