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.
A strictly increasing index map satisfies
Statement
Let be a function, written , and recall that is strictly increasing when whenever (Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences, Order on the natural numbers).
- Consecutive comparisons suffice. If for every , then is strictly increasing.
- Growth. If is strictly increasing then for every .
Claim 1 is what one checks in practice when exhibiting a subsequence; claim 2 is what every later subsequence argument uses.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A function , written , with the successor and the order of Order on the natural numbers; claim 1 is proved under the standing assumption that for every , and claim 2 under the standing assumption that is strictly increasing (Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences).
denotes the statement: for every .
denotes the statement: .
Order and successor on : means for some , so for every because ; and with , so (Order on the natural numbers, Addition of natural numbers, Left identity for addition, No natural number equals its own successor).
Discreteness: if and only if (Discreteness: is the immediate successor).
Induction principle: if holds and implies for every , then holds for every (The principle of mathematical induction).
The order on is reflexive, antisymmetric, transitive and total, and satisfies trichotomy ( is a linear order on , Trichotomy of the order on ).
Proof
Base case for claim 1: holds vacuously, since no satisfies ; indeed always holds, and together with would contradict antisymmetry.
Inductive hypothesis for claim 1: fix and assume , that is for every .
Base case for claim 2: states , which holds because for every natural .
Inductive hypothesis for claim 2: fix and assume , that is .
Inductive step for claim 1: let . By trichotomy either , or , or . The case is impossible, since it gives by [L2], which together with contradicts antisymmetry. If then by the standing assumption. If then by step 1.2 and by the standing assumption, so by transitivity. In every admissible case , so holds.
Inductive step for claim 2: by [L1], so strict increase gives ; combined with from step 1.4 this yields , hence by [L2], which is .
Both inductions are complete, so by the induction principle holds for every , which is claim 1, and holds for every , which is claim 2.
Remarks
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Claim 2 is sharp: the identity map is strictly increasing with throughout, so no better bound than holds for all strictly increasing index maps.
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Claim 2 is exactly what makes a subsequence inherit a limit (Subsequences inherit the limit): a threshold that works for the original sequence works unchanged for the subsequence, because whenever .
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Nothing here is about ; both claims are about alone. Both are proved by induction ([L3]), and that is the method, not an order property. Claim 2 needs three order facts on top of the induction: that is least, which is what makes its base case true ([L1], step 1.3); discreteness (Discreteness: is the immediate successor, [L2]), which upgrades to (step 2.2); and transitivity in its mixed form, which composes with into ([L4], step 2.2). Claim 1 additionally uses trichotomy and antisymmetry ([L4]).
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Of those three, neither the least element nor discreteness may be dropped. Discreteness alone is not enough: is discrete in the same sense, iff , yet is strictly increasing on with everywhere. What lacks is a least element to anchor the induction. A least element alone is not enough either, which is what fails over : on the nonnegative rationals is strictly increasing and fixes the least element , but at every positive rational.
Depends on
Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences
The principle of mathematical induction
Discreteness: is the immediate successor
Order on the natural numbers
Addition of natural numbers
Left identity for addition
No natural number equals its own successor
is a linear order on
Trichotomy of the order on