Today, I shall use the theorem of Michael discussed earlier to prove that a metric space is paracompact.
Theorem 1 (Stone) A metric space is paracompact.
This theorem seems to use the axiom of choice, or some version thereof, in all proofs.
1. Proof of Stone’s theorem
Suppose given a cover of the metric space
(with metric
, say). We will show that there is a refinement of
that can be decomposed into a countable collection of locally finite families. Thanks to Michael’s theorem, this will prove the result.
First, suppose that we have a countable cover . Then the idea is to consider the differences
, which form a point-finite cover of
(i.e. each point is contained in finitely many of the differences). Then, expand these slightly using the metric to make them open.
However, this naive approach as to be modified. First, we will have to generalize to arbitrary index sets, not just the natural numbers. Second, we need local finiteness, not just point-finiteness.
So, for starters, well-order the index set in which
takes values. This is where we use the axiom of choice; for separable metric spaces, this would not be necessary, since they have a countable basis, and every open cover can be replaced by a countable subcover.
Now we shrink the slightly. Namely, we write
In other words, to say that a point belongs to is to say that it belongs to
and is not too far from the boundary. Note that
.
We define the sets
The point of this is to excise out redundancies when possible. Note that the form a cover of
. Indeed, if
, choose the smallest
with
. Then
for
sufficiently large. The good news is that we have excised out redundancies, but the bad news is that the
are not open. So set
These are small neighborhoods of the and are consequently open. Moreover, the
are subsets of
and consequently form a refinement of
. Thus, if we can show that each
is locally finite, then we will have a refinement
of which can be decomposed into a countable collection of locally finite families.
So, that’s the plan. We will actually show that for each , there is a
such that
if
. Indeed, suppose
, and
. Without loss of generality,
. Then
is within
of a point
and
is within
of a point
in
. Now the distance of
to
is, by definition, at least
, because
. However,
is not in
because of the way the
were defined, so its distance to
is at most
. In particular,
so it follows that .
In particular, the are mildly separated from each other, which means that any
neighborhood of any point can intersect at most one of the
(where
of course is fixed). In particular, the
for each
are locally finite. This proves the claim we wanted. This also establishes the full result.
August 21, 2010 at 8:44 pm
[…] Paracompactness over at Climbing Mount Bourbaki Filed under: Blath by Andrew — Leave a comment August 21, 2010 I have the next Rudin post in draft, but in needs some more work. In the meanwhile, Ankit Mathew is working on a sequence on paracompactness, starting here and continuing here and here. […]