Re: First Year Uni Calculus Marathon
A glimpse of one of the first subtleties of measure theory:
Consider the set of points on the unit circle C.
Suppose we want a way of measuring the size/length of arbitrary subsets of C. I.e. we want a function m that maps arbitrary subsets of C to non-negative real numbers.
What properties should such a function have?
P1. We certainly would hope that m is rotationally invariant. I.e. we need m(R(A))=m(A) for arbitrary rotations R of the circle.
P2. We would also like the size of the sum of disjoint subsets to be equal to the sum of the sizes of the individual subsets. That is, we require
if
are pairwise disjoint subsets of
.
One of the axioms of mathematics is the axiom of choice:
(AC) Given an arbitrary collection of nonempty sets sets
where J is an index set, there exists a function
such that
. Informally, this says that given an indexed collection of nonempty sets, we can choose an element from each set and lump these together to form a new set. (This does NOT follow from the other axioms of set theory.)
Problem: Prove that there does not exist such a function m satisfying the properties P1 and P2.
Hint: (AC) is key. Use a clever equivalence relation and (AC) to assemble a sets that lead to contradictions with P1 and P2. If you post partial progress, I can provide further hints.