Let be the cardinal of . For all , is continuous so
Let be two continuous functions that have the same restriction on . For all , find a sequence such that . Then the limit of the sequence is by continuity. This means that:
Let be the order-type of . For every sequence we define the sum of order types . For each , there is some such that belongs to the -th term. In this -th order-type, can be viewed as an element of . Hence we have a one-to-one map from to which is countable by exercise 3.3. Hence is a countable order-type and obviously linear.
Suppose that we have an isomorphism between two sets and of respective order-types and . The elements of can be written those of can be written and similarly for . Suppose that and let be the least index such that or without loss of generality .
First note that for any and any , we can not find such that for otherwise which is inconsistent with the order-type of . In particular, for any , is not sent on an element for otherwise is necessarily sent to , to … and so forth until which is sent to . Then for we can find a leading to a contradiction (we could also have considered . This means that . From this and using the same method as above we deduce that .
We shall prove that for all we have and . If and these equalities hold for all , then necessarily and because is one-to-one. But because is increasing, the later equality becomes and hence . By induction, we show that for all and so as expected. By the discussion above, . By the induction hypothesis and because is one-to-one, . If then because is increasing, does not reach any element of . This contradicts the fact that it is onto. Hence the only possibility is .
As above, and for some . Thus since is increasing, the element (for example) is not reached and this contradicts the fact that is onto. Finally, the map is one-to-one and so there are at least such order-types.
Let be the set of algebraic reals. so . The set of all integer polynomials can be viewed as a subsets of integer sequences of finite length . This set is countable by exercises 3.3 and 3.4, so is well-ordonable. For any , we consider the smallest polynomial of which is a root. We have for some and by the fundamental theorem, has roots roots. . If is such that then we define . Hence we have constructed (without the axiom of choice) a one-to-one map from to . Again, by exercises 3.3 and 3.4 this set is countable and hence .
Let be countable. We have . But because the only possibility is .
because .
because by exercise 4.3.
Let be an open set of . We shall define a sequence of open interval with rational endpoints and included in . The ’s will be pairwise disjoint and we define open sets . Because every collection of disjoint open nonempty intervals is at most countable (see p. 39) we get a sequence for some ordinal at most countable.
Hence let be an ordinal and suppose that we have contructed for all . If is empty then and we stop the construction. Otherwise, we start by reducing each and replacing its endpoints by and so that the open set is still nonempty. Hence there is a point and a positive number such that the ball of center and radius is included in . By density of in , there are rationals such that and so a nonempty interval with rational endpoints such that . Because there are at most such intervals, we can pick one such interval , without using the axiom of choice.
Finally, reordering the and adding empty ones (i.e. ) we have shown that every open interval can be written
for an open interval with rational endpoints. Hence there are at most
open sets in . The collection of open intervals for clearly shows that there are exactly many open intervals.
Alternative construction of the decomposition of : let be an enumeration of nonempty open interval with rational endpoints which are included in . Let the element of for which is minimal i.e. not included in any other . The are pairwise disjoint: if and () have nonempty intersection then for some and . Hence . Moreover, we have
We define for all the closed set (union of closed intervals):
Clearly, the Cantor set is defined by and hence is closed as an intersection of closed sets. Moreover, it is nonempty (for example ). We shall see that it has no isolated point and so is perfect.
Let be a point in . If there is such that for all then we define for all . Otherwise we define . In both case, and for all and , thus is not isolated.
Let be a perfect set and . Define . Then is perfect and we can use the proof of theorem 4.5 to construct a one-to-one function from to . Hence .
Suppose are perfect sets. Let . Since is closed, there is some open interval such that . Hence and by exercise 4.8, . But we have
Finally
For any set we have and if is closed, . If moreover is perfect and , then a neighborhood of contains an open neighborhood of which is uncountable by 4.8 and thus . Finally, .
For any sets it is easy to see that . Let be a perfect set and a closed set, such that . Then and by 4.10 . So .
Let be an uncountable closed set and the perfect set contructed in theorem 4.6. By exercise 4.11, we have . Let . For any , we have is uncountable by definition of . But we also have countable so is uncountable and a fortiori nonempty. As a consequence, . Finally .
By 4.12, we get . Let’s see it is the only such decomposition. Suppose where are perfect. We have . But is countable so is at most countable. By 4.9, this means . Similarly, we get and so .
Suppose there are open sets such that
In particular, for each , and because is dense, so is . Taking the complement, we get
Because the ’s are open dense, the ’s are nowhere dense. Hence the Baire space (which is homeomorphic to ) is the union of countably many nowhere dense sets. This contradicts the Baire Category Theorem.
Denote by the set of borel sets. Let be a continuous function and define to be the set of such that . If is open, then because is continuous is open and so belongs to . If we have a countable family of elements of then we have
and so . Similarly, if then and thus . Finally, is a -algebra which contains the open sets and so . In particular, the preimage of a borel set is a borel set.
Let be a function and the set of points where it is continuous. For all and define the open set
where for each , is the least positive integer such that . Such an integer exists because is continuous at . We shall prove that
i.e. is of type . The inclusion from left to right is trivial so let’s consider the other direction. Consider a point and a neighborhood of . Let be an integer such that . Because , there exists such that . In particular, . Moreover, if , the triangular inequality gives
Hence if , we have and . So is continuous at i.e. .
Consider the function given by where for all , and . is clearly a bijection. We shall prove it is actually a homeomorphism.
Now pick and define . For any neighborhood of there exists some such that . Define the open neighborhood of . For any and , we have and . Hence . Finally and is continuous.
Conversely, choose define . Let be a neighborhood of . There exists some such that . Define . Let and . For all , we have and . So . Finally and is continuous.
We proceed the same way. Let be a bijection and define the bijection by . Again, this is a homeomorphism. Let and . If is a neighborhood of then there exists such that . Now let where and are the canonical projection. Define the open neighborhood of . Then it’s easy to prove and so is continuous. Conversely, with as above and a neighborhood of there exists such that . We define and and open neighborhood of . Then . Thus is continuous.
Let be a closed subset of . We have . is a tree and for , there exists and such that . If we define then (because ) and . So does not have any maximal node.
Let’s consider the map from the set of closed subsets of to the set of sequential trees without a maximal node given by . By a result of the book, it is obvious that the function is one-to-one: If , . Another (similar) proof: for all , pick such that . We have . So there exists some such that . In particular, . So is in . We do the same the other direction and get .
Let’s prove that the map is surjective. We consider a sequential tree without maximal node. We define . Let . For all , . So there is such that . Thus and i.e. is closed. By definition . In particular it is clear that . Suppose that the previous inequality is strict. Let such that . Let be another element of , of length . Because is a tree, we can define for all , . Because has no maximal element and is countable, we can construct by induction for all , an element that extends . Moreover, because is a tree, we can suppose of length . is a Cauchy sequence and . By construction, . Hence and a fortiori . So is a maximal element. Contradiction.
Let be a perfect Polish space. Consider a metric such that is complete and a countable dense subset. We denote by the closed ball of center and radius . For any sequence , we shall construct by induction such a ball . We shall take and , so there are at most countably many possibilities and so we won’t need the axiom of choice.
We start by choosing and setting . If is contructed, then because is perfect, the open ball contains at least another point . For small enough, the ball is included in and does not contain . Then because is dense, there exists some . For a nonzero small enough, and are two disjoint balls included in of diameters . Thus we can choose two such balls and .
Now for each , the set contains exactly one element because is complete. We let be this element of . is one-to-one: if are distinct and is the least index such that , then and but these two balls are disjoint by construction. We note the inverse function defined on the image .
Given and we take such that then if i.e. , we have but this ball is of diameter . Conversely, given and a neighborhood of , we choose large enough so that . Then if is such that is in the open neighborhood of , we necessarily have and so . Hence both and are continuous and is an homeomophism.
As in exercise 4.7, we consider for each the set , union of the of closed balls where is of length . By construction, and is closed as an intersection of closed sets. Finally, is a closed subset homeomorphic to the Cantor space .
First recall that is a homeomorphism and from that we obtain a homeomorphism between and the Hilbert cube .
Let be a Polish space and be a countable dense subset of . We define the map by . This map is one-to-one: if then and because is dense we can find some . Then while and so . We will note its inverse function, defined on its image .
Let and be a neighborhood of . There are some and such that is an open subset of . If is such that then so . Conversely, let and . Because is dense, there is some such that . Then if is in the open subset we have in particular and so . Hence both and are continuous and is an homeomophism.
Finally, we have where are open sets defined by
Hence, any Polish space is homeomorphic to a subspace of the Hilbert Cube.