Friday, 22 February 2013

real analysis - Proving that a point on the boundary of a closed ball in a metric space cannot be interior.



The idea of this proof is quite clear but I'm having some trouble making it rigorous. Suppose we have a metric space (X,d) and a closed ball U:={xX:d(x,a)t} for some fixed a and t. I want to prove that a point on the boundary of this ball is not an interior point. Here is my "proof":



Let x satisfy d(x,a)=t (i.e. let x be a boundary point). Suppose also that x is interior. Then r>0 such that the open ball Dr(x) is contained within U. This an immediate contradiction, because some points in this open ball are outside U.




My problem is with the very last statement, which relies entirely upon geometrical intuition and is not very rigorous. I suppose I could try a bit harder with this idea: along the line connecting a and x, we can go a bit further along the line still inside the r -ball and find a point outside of U. But this still doesn't sound very rigorous, with things like lines only really applying to Euclidean space.



How can I make this rigorous?



EDIT: Thanks for the answers and comments, I now realize that this cannot be proven at all.


Answer



In a general metric space the boundary of the set U={x:d(x,a)t} is not the set {x:d(x,a)=t}.



The (usual) definition of boundary point of a set implies that the boundary and interior of a set are disjoint.



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