A generic approach to measuring the strength of completeness/compactness of various types of spaces and ordered structures

DOI10.1007/S13398-020-00984-3MaRDI QIDQ2050189zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Hanna Ćmiel, Franz-Viktor Kuhlmann, Katarzyna Kuhlmann

Publication date 30 August 2021

Published in Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Serie A: Matemáticas. RACSAM (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09930

Abstract: With a simple generic approach, we develop a classification that encodes and measures the strength of completeness (or compactness) properties in various types of spaces and ordered structures. The approach also allows us to encode notions of functions being contractive in these spaces and structures. As a sample of possible applications we discuss metric spaces, ultrametric spaces, ordered groups and fields, topological spaces, partially ordered sets, and lattices. We describe several notions of completeness in these spaces and structures and determine their respective strengths. In order to illustrate some consequences of the levels of strength, we give examples of generic fixed point theorems which then can be specialized to theorems in various applications which work with contracting functions and some completeness property of the underlying space. Ball spaces are nonempty sets of nonempty subsets of a given set. They are called spherically complete if every chain of balls has a nonempty intersection. This is all that is needed for the encoding of completeness notions. We discuss operations on the sets of balls to determine when they lead to larger sets of balls; if so, then the properties of the so obtained new ball spaces are determined. The operations can lead to increased level of strength, or to ball spaces of newly constructed structures, such as products. Further, the general framework makes it possible to transfer concepts and approaches from one application to the other; as examples we discuss theorems analogous to the Knaster--Tarski Fixed Point Theorem for lattices and theorems analogous to the Tychonoff Theorem for topological spaces.

Review text

The generic approach mentioned in the title is that of imposing conditions on families of subsets of a given set. Thus, a \emph{ball structure}, \(\mathcal{B}\), on a set~\(X\) is simply a subfamily of~\(\mathcal{P}(X)\); its members are called \emph{balls}. The authors give a five-by-three matrix of properties that such a family may have; the three columns are indexed by `chain', `downward directed system', and `centered system' respectively. The five rows are indexed by the type of intersection the system can have; just non-empty, or containing a specific type of ball, or even being a ball. Each property then states that every system of the column type has an intersection of the row type.\par The authors compare these notions, investigate when they are equivalent, and give various examples of structures: certainly the family of balls of a metric space forms a ball structure, as does the family of closed intervals in a linearly ordered set, or the family of closed sets in a compact space. In that latter case the whole matrix collapses, which follows from (or reproves) the well-known theorem that a space is compact iff every chain of nonempty closed sets has a nonempty intersection.\par Using the matrix the authors classify various completeness properties of structures, e.g., compactness corresponds to the collapsed matrix, and completeness for metric spaces is related to countable chains of balls. At the same time ball structures provide an opportunity to consider fixed-point theorems from a general point of view. Many of the contraction-like conditions that one sees in the literature have their version in suitable ball structures.

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