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.
Monotonicity of the supremum under inclusion
Statement
Let and be subsets of with , and suppose is bounded above. Then is nonempty and bounded above, both and exist, and
Facts & Assumptions
Given: Sets with , , and bounded above.
Supremum and the least-upper-bound property: means is an upper bound of and for every upper bound of ; every nonempty that is bounded above has such a (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).
A least upper bound is unique, so denotes a single real number (Suprema and infima are unique).
Proof
Since is bounded above, fix an upper bound of , so for every .
By hypothesis is nonempty and , so is nonempty as well.
Every lies in and therefore satisfies ; hence is an upper bound of and is bounded above.
Both and are nonempty and bounded above, so by the least-upper-bound property and exist, each uniquely.
As is an upper bound of , every satisfies ; since , every satisfies , so is an upper bound of .
The number is the least of the upper bounds of , and is one of them, hence .
Remarks
- The hypothesis that the larger set is bounded above cannot be weakened to the smaller one being bounded above: has to exist for the inequality to mean anything.
- The dual statement, for with bounded below, follows by applying this lemma to , which gives , and then negating and using (Reflection through zero exchanges upper and lower bounds, Every nonempty set bounded below has an infimum).