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.
Every nonempty set bounded below has an infimum
Statement
Let be nonempty and bounded below. Then has a greatest lower bound in (Greatest lower bound (infimum)), and it is given by
In particular the complete ordered field has the greatest-lower-bound property, which is therefore not an extra axiom: it is a consequence of the least-upper-bound property.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A nonempty that is bounded below, and its reflection .
The least-upper-bound property of : every nonempty subset of that is bounded above has a least upper bound in , namely an upper bound that is every upper bound (Complete ordered field (least-upper-bound property)).
Reflection: ; is nonempty exactly when is; is an upper bound of a set exactly when is a lower bound of ; and is a lower bound of exactly when is an upper bound of (Reflection through zero exchanges upper and lower bounds).
Greatest lower bound (infimum): is one for when is a lower bound of and for every lower bound of (Greatest lower bound (infimum)).
A least upper bound and a greatest lower bound are unique when they exist, so the notations and are unambiguous (Suprema and infima are unique).
Negation reverses the order, elementwise: , because and additive inverses are unique (Field, Identities and inverses in a field are unique); and if and only if , because translation invariance applied with the constant turns into and, applied with the constant , turns back into , while holds exactly when (Order is preserved by adding a constant and by adding inequalities).
Proof
By hypothesis and is bounded below; fix a lower bound of , so for every .
Let be an arbitrary lower bound of ; then is an upper bound of .
Since is nonempty, so is , and since is a lower bound of , its negative is an upper bound of ; hence is a nonempty subset of that is bounded above.
By the least-upper-bound property, has a least upper bound in ; write , which is well defined by uniqueness.
Define .
The element is the least of the upper bounds of and is one of them, hence .
Apply the reflection fact to the set : since is an upper bound of , its negative is a lower bound of , and ; so is a lower bound of .
Negating the inequality reverses it, giving , that is .
Thus is a lower bound of satisfying for every lower bound of , so is a greatest lower bound of ; it is the only one, so exists and .
Remarks
- The theorem is not a restatement of the least-upper-bound property: it is proved from it, by transporting the problem across the order-reversing bijection of Reflection through zero exchanges upper and lower bounds. Nothing about beyond the complete-ordered-field axioms is used.
- The hypotheses are both needed. The empty set is bounded below by every real and has no greatest lower bound, and a set unbounded below has no lower bound at all; the dual failures for suprema are recorded in FALSE: every subset of has a supremum.
- The identity is the standard device for turning any statement about suprema into its dual; Epsilon characterisation of the infimum is the first application on this page.