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Compactness and Continuity, Constructively Revisited
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Compactness and Continuity, Constructively Revisited
Douglas Bridges5 , Hajime Ishihara6 and Peter Schuster7 
| (5) |
Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand |
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School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Tatsunokuchi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan |
| (7) |
Mathematisches Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstraβe 39, 80333 München, Germany |
Abstract
In this paper, the relationships between various classical compactness properties, including the constructively acceptable
one of total boundedness and completeness, are examined using intuitionistic logic. For instance, although every metric space
clearly is totally bounded whenever it possesses the Heine-Borel property that every open cover admits of a finite subcover,
we show that one cannot expect a constructive proof that any such space is also complete. Even the Bolzano-Weierstraβ principle,
that every sequence in a compact metric space has a convergent subsequence, is brought under our scrutiny; although that principle
is essentially nonconstructive, we produce a reasonable, classically equivalent modification of it that is constructively
valid. To this end, we require each sequence under consideration to satisfy uniformly a classically trivial approximate pigeonhole
principle—that if infinitely many elements of the sequence are close to a finite set of points, then infinitely many of those
elements are close to one of these points—whose constructive failure for arbitrary sequences is then detected as the obstacle
to any constructive relevance of the traditional Bolzano-Weierstraβ principle.
2000 MSC (AMS) - 03F60 - 26E40 - 54E45
Keywords Compact Metric Spaces - Uniform Continuity - Constructive Analysis
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