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 sequence has at most one limit
Statement
Let be a sequence of reals (Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences) and let . If converges to and converges to (Limits and Cauchy sequences of reals), then . A sequence therefore has at most one limit, and when a limit exists it may be denoted .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A sequence of reals and reals such that converges to and converges to (Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences, Limits and Cauchy sequences of reals).
Convergence: converges to when for every rational there is with for all (Limits and Cauchy sequences of reals).
Triangle inequality: in any ordered field, in particular in (The triangle inequality, Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).
Absolute value: , and if and only if , and (Basic properties of the absolute value).
Small rationals: for every real there is a rational with . Either route gives this: density of in (The rationals embed densely in the reals) applied to the pair ; or the Archimedean property (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean) applied to , which yields a natural with and hence (Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order).
Order arithmetic in . Trichotomy, so together with and forces ; transitivity and irreflexivity of ; and, since means or , the mixed form (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property), Ordered field). Adding two strict inequalities: and give (Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities). Multiplying by a positive: for , gives (Sign rules for products and monotonicity of multiplication). Halving a positive: (The multiplicative identity is positive), so because the positives are closed under addition (Ordered field), hence (Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order) and whenever (Sign rules for products and monotonicity of multiplication).
The order on is total, so any two indices admit an index with and ( is a linear order on ).
Proof
Suppose, for contradiction, that .
Then , so while ; by trichotomy , and hence .
Choose a rational with ; multiplying that inequality by and using gives .
Since converges to there is with for all , and since converges to there is with for all .
Fix an index with and ; then , while adding the two strict inequalities of step 4.1 gives ; composing the non-strict inequality with the strict one yields .
Combining, , so , which contradicts irreflexivity of the strict order.
The assumption is therefore untenable, so : a sequence of reals has at most one limit.
Remarks
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Uniqueness is what licenses the notation and the phrase the limit. Without it the symbol would not denote. This library writes only for sequences already known to converge, exactly as it writes only for sets already known to have a supremum (Conventions: , unbounded sets, and the extended reals).
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The proof uses only that is an ordered field in which arbitrarily small positive rationals exist, that is, an Archimedean ordered field (Every complete ordered field is Archimedean). Completeness is not needed: limits are unique in too, where many sequences fail to have one.
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The hypothesis is genuinely about a single sequence having two limits. Two different sequences may of course share a limit, and a sequence with no limit at all is not excluded by anything here.
Depends on
Limits and Cauchy sequences of reals
Sequences of reals: bounded, eventually, frequently, tails, subsequences
Every complete ordered field is Archimedean
The triangle inequality
Basic properties of the absolute value
The rationals embed densely in the reals
Inverses of positives are positive, and reciprocation reverses order
Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities
Sign rules for products and monotonicity of multiplication
The multiplicative identity is positive
is a linear order on
Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)
Ordered field