Abstract
A set is bounded if its points are not arbitrarily far from each other; but boundedness is not preserved by continuous functions. Totally bounded sets are special types of bounded sets that are preserved by uniformly continuous functions. Any sequence in such a set must have a convergent subsequence. A further strengthening of the definition leads to compact sets, which are preserved by continuous functions. Two equivalent formulations are given, one by the Heine-Borel theorem, as the complete and totally bounded subsets, and another by the Bolzano-Weierstraß theorem, when every sequence has a convergent subsequence in the subset. The chapter closes with the first non-trivial example of a complete metric space: the space \(C(K)\) of continuous complex-valued functions on a compact metric space \(K\). The Arzela- Ascoli theorem identifies its totally bounded subsets. The Stone-Weierstraß theorem states that the polynomials in \(z\) and \(\bar{z}\) are dense in \(C(K)\) when \(K\subseteq \mathbb {C}\).
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Muscat, J. (2014). Compactness. In: Functional Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06728-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06728-5_6
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06728-5
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