Measure theory conjecture
By Brad Rodgers on Sunday, September 29,
2002 - 03:35 am:
Suppose we have a set
with measure
, and
. If
,
for all positive
, does that imply that
? For all natural numbers
?
Brad
By Michael Doré on Sunday, September 29, 2002 -
02:28 pm:
Note that if
then the set
is null. For if there is a subset of
of measure
each element of
which is
then for even
, your integral would be
which tends to
as
, a contradiction. This means that
is null, by the countable union property. Similarly
is null. So
is completely contained in
apart
from a null set.
Now let
and let
be a continuous function which is 1 on
and 0 on
(and linear in between). For any
,
by Weierstrass' theorem we can find a polynomial
such that
for all
in
. Therefore
for all
in
where
. So
is a polynomial with no
constant coefficient.
Now we have:
for all positive integers
. Therefore:
It quickly follows that
is null so
is null.
So
is completely contained in
apart from a null set.
Using similar approximation techniques you can show that for any
contained in
then measure
. My guess is that it
should follow quickly that
is the whole of
apart from a null
set but I haven't worked out the details.
By Michael Doré on Sunday, September 29, 2002 - 05:00 pm:
Actually we can simplify this somewhat. As above
is null. Now we're given:
for all positive integers
. However this relationship is also trivially
true for
(a fact I managed to miss earlier!) Therefore for any
polynomial
we have:
So by Weierstrass this is true for any continuous function
(uniformly
approximate the continuous function by polynomials on
and it doesn't
matter what happens outside
).
Certainly
is null on
(let
for positive
and
on
and
for
).
So
is contained in
except for a null set and:
for all continuous
. Then for any subinterval
of
set
on
and make it fall off to 0 very rapidly outside
.
Taking the limit we have
so the
measure of
is
as I stated earlier.
Is this enough to conclude that
is the same as
apart from a null
difference? I think something like this came up earlier in a thread in which
it was asked whether a set existed such that its Lesbegue measure on any
interval
was
. As I remember Dan Goodman said there was a
theorem which said no, the Lesbegue density of any measurable set is 0 or 1
almost everywhere. In this case this implies that
and the measure of
is
for every subinterval
of
. In
particular the measure of
on
is 1 and so
is almost the same as
(i.e. almost all elements of
are in
and almost all
elements on
are in
).
By Michael Doré on Sunday, September 29, 2002 - 11:02 pm:
Of course we can do this last bit without using
the density theorem.
has measure
so it has outer measure
.
Therefore for any
we can cover
with countably many disjoint
open intervals
,
, ... such that
.
Therefore:
So by the countable union property:
But the set
is just
(all its
elements are in
and all elements of
are in one of the
s). So:
This holds for every
so
and
is
up to a
null difference.
By Ian Short on Monday, September 30, 2002
- 12:55 pm:
That seems like a really good
solution!