All of noam's Comments + Replies

noam10

Can someone break Definition 1.1 down for me? I got lost in all the notation and what acts on what, what is projected to where..

noam10

Though now that I think about it, if the difference is some irrational number then this seems to work, as any set  would contain exactly one unique rational number. Now they each have the cardinality of R, and the family has the cardinality of Q. And then it all seems to work.
Does that seem right?

1Lorxus
That sounds like it also works. I've seen the proof both ways and I think I was mixing them together in my head.
noam10

I fail to see why the family of sets  is countable. if  is of cardinality , which I totally agree about, then how can a union of a countable family of them which is basically  be equal (0,1)?

1Lorxus
The number of such sets is specifically uncountable. Each set is of itself countable. Apologies, I'll fix the OP.
1noam
Though now that I think about it, if the difference is some irrational number then this seems to work, as any set Xi would contain exactly one unique rational number. Now they each have the cardinality of R, and the family has the cardinality of Q. And then it all seems to work. Does that seem right?
noam21

What do you mean by "no reasonable σ-algebra can encompass the full power set"? The power set is the biggest σ-algebra of a set, but what set? And what is "reasonable"?

2Lorxus
Consider the following example for the interval X = (0, 1) (which is homeomorphic to R). Suppose we wanted to assign measures to all of its subsets, and do so in accordance with the ordinary desiderata of sigma-additivity and m(X) = 1. Now partition the interval into an uncountable family of countable sets X_i such that two numbers live in the same subset iff they differ by a rational number. (Make sure you fully understand this construction before continuing!) What measure should we assign to any such X_i? We can quickly see that the X_i are all of equal cardinality (that of Aleph-null) and even have natural maps to each other (given by adding irrationals mod 1). We can't assign them measure 0 - by sigma-additivity that gives us m(X) = 0. We can't assign them positive measure - again by sigma-additivity that gives us m(X) >> 1. Thus we cannot assign such subsets any measure, so we must have been wrong from the start that 2^X was a reasonable sigma-algebra to pick as the foundation of our measure in X.
noam21

Found a typo:

Definition 2.2. Let  be a metric space. We say that a functional  is k-Lipschitz
continuous if there exists  such that for all . In
such a case k is called the Lipschitz constant of f.

I think it should be:  instead, as  while .

1Lorxus
This seems correct. I'll add it to the list of fixes.