IfLet's take an arbitrary pointis a sequence of numbers in the closed segment
, then it has a subsequence which converges to a point in
.
, which is somewhere between the points
and
. Observe the segment
. It may contain a finite number of members from the sequence
and it may contain an infinite number of them. If we were to take the point
to be
, the segment
would obviously contain an infinite number of members from the sequence. If we take
to be
, the segment
would contain at most only one point from the sequence. Introducing the set
:Sidenote: A segment containing zero elements from![]()
will be considered to contain a finite number of them.
belongs to
. There is one more thing we need to note about the set
. If a point
belongs to
, that would mean that
has a finite number of members from
in it, and that would therefore mean that any subset of
would also have only a finite number of members from
. Hence for any
that belongs to
, all the points between that
and
would also belong to
. We can see that
is actually a segment, starting at
and ending in some unknown location in
. Now we make our next move:We are now going to show that![]()
is an accumulation point of
.
, and assume that
. Now we take an arbitrarily small
. Observe the segment
.
cannot belong to
since it is higher than the supremum. Hence
contains an infinite number of
members. Now observe the segment
.
must belong to
, since it is smaller than the supremum of the segment
. Thus
contains a finite number of members from
. But
is a subset of
. If the bigger set contains an infinite number of
members and its subset contains only a finite amount, the complement of
the subset must contain an infinite number of members from
. We have proved that for every
, the segment
contains an infinite number of members from the sequence. To rephrase that, we have proven that there exists a point
in the segment
, such that every neighborhood of
includes an infinite number of members from the sequence. We have proven that
is an accumulation point of
, from which it is easy to prove that there exists a subsequence of
which converges to
, and that spells Q.E.D.
it can still be shown that
is an accumulation point. I will not expand upon that since it is too boring.
,
contains an infinite number of members from
. Now we will construct a subsequence of
that converges to
. Take
to be
. Take any
member in
to be our first member. Take
to be
. Take an
member in
with an index number higher than the previous member to be our next
member--You are guaranteed to find one since there are an infinite
number of
members in that segment. Take
to be
, and now find an
member in
with an index number higher than that of our previous member. Again you
are guaranteed to find one. This process can continue indefinitely,
thus constructing a subsequence of
that converges to
. (I told you an infinite construction has to come at some point!)All content in this website is copyright © 1986-2011 Ram Rachum.