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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Real Analysis \mathbb{R}e-view

On going through a layperson-readable take on Skolem's paradox here I noticed that the author (Steven Landsburg) talked about producing different models of \mathbb{R} from different 'models' of \mathcal{P}(\mathbb{Q}) (powersets of the rationals). Why didn't he talk about Cauchy sequences? (because that's how we construct \mathbb{R}, right?)
As long as we don't mind throwing out the really boring sequences (like \{1,1,1,1...\}) with only finitely many unique elements, no emphasis on sequences is necessary. Because \mathbb{Q} is countable, any subset is at most countable, and can be ordered and considered as a sequence. Furthermore, actually assigning an ordering is unnecessary...

Call a subset S \subset \mathbb{Q} a Cauchy subset iif
1) S is infinite
2) \, \forall \, \epsilon > 0 \, \exists \, x \in S such that \{ y \in S : |x-y|\geq \epsilon \} is finite

As an exercise, show (because my probably-nonexistent readership loves exercises, right?)
-S is a Cauchy sequence under a particular ordering \Leftrightarrow S is a Cauchy set \Leftrightarrow S is a Cauchy sequence under every ordering.
-All the above statements/definitions work equally well with subsets of \mathbb{R}, not just \mathbb{Q}. (hint: show that condition 2 forces S to be at most countable)

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