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Compactness and Continuity, Constructively Revisited

Douglas BridgesContact Information, Hajime IshiharaContact Information and Peter SchusterContact Information

(5)  Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
(6)  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



Contact Information Douglas Bridges
Email: d.bridges@math.canterbury.ac.nz

Contact Information Hajime Ishihara
Email: ishihara@jaist.ac.jp

Contact Information Peter Schuster
Email: pschust@mathematik.uni-muenchen.de
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