Friday, 24 March 2017

proof verification - Thomae's function variant



let f:[0,1]R be define as
f={1,x=0x,xRQ1q,x=pq,gcd(p,q)=1



(1) I believe this function is continuous at the irrationals, but discontinuous at the rationals.



attempt:




to show it is discontinuous at the rationals, consider a sequence (xn) of irrationals converging to 0 with (xn)=(πn), we have as
n, xn0, but f(xn)=x since every term in the sequence is irrational, and f(xn)0, but at x=0 f(0)=1 so the function is not continuous there.



For other rational numbers, I switch to an ϵ-δ argument:



assume that f was continuous at x=pq, then by definition of continuity, |f(x)f(y)|<ϵ when |xy|<δ, now choose ϵ<1q, which now implies |f(x)1q|<1q whenever |xy|<δ, but since the irrationals are dense, we can find an irrational y within a δ-ball of x, i.e. y(xδ,y+δ), denote this as y and f(y)=x, so |x1q|<1q



This is where I get stuck, I don't know where to take it from here. I am pretty sure I need to change my ϵ but I am not seeing what I should change it to to make the proof work.



(2)




To show f is continuous at the irrationals, we can argue by the Archimedian property that nN with $\frac{1}{\epsilon}define δ=min{i=1,...,n}δi, clearly δ>0, and if x is irrational, we have |f(x)f(x)|=0 so continuity at the irrationals is established.


Answer



This function is not continuous at the irrationals. Consider x=e3 and the sequence (xn)nN with:



xn=nk=013k!ne3.



Then, f(e3)=e3 since e is transcendental, but f(xn)1nn0, because




nk=013k!=13n!nk=0n!k!



with the sum on the right-hand side being an integer that is not divisible by n (all summands except the last are multiples of n, with the last one being 1). This means the n in the denominator will never cancel, while the numerator is replaced by 1.


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