Wednesday, 1 March 2017

real analysis - How to show that Bernstein set is not Lebesgue measurable?

A Bernstein set is a subset of the real line that meets every uncountable closed subset of the real line but that contains none of them. (They can be easily generalized to Rn, but for the sake of simplicity we might stick with R.) See also this post for some more details: What's application of Bernstein Set? (A proof of existence of Bernstein sets is given there - it is based on transfinite induction and well-ordering theorem. Also various properties of Bernstein sets are mentioned there, including the fact that existence of Bernstein sets cannot be shown in ZF.)



My questions are:




  • How can we show that a Bernstein set is not Lebesgue measurable?


  • Can these proofs be generalized to other measures?



By the latter I mean whether something like this can be said about some of the proofs: "We have shown that Bernstein set is not Lebesgue measurable. But the same proof works for any translation-invariant measure such that all closed sets are measurable and bounded sets have finite measure." (This is just a hypothetical example to make a bit clearer what I mean by the second question.)






When I was thinking about this problem, I thought that one way to go would be using regularity of Lebesgue measure. Let B be a Bernstein set. If CB is compact, then it has to be countable and thus μ(C)=0. Similarly, if BU then B does not intersect the closed set RU, hence U is complement of countable set and μ(U)=. So from regularity of Lebesgue measure we get that B is not measurable.



I have considered also posting my attempt sketched in the previous paragraph as an answer. But I decided not to do so - maybe somebody who knows more about this will be able to expand on this or add some other related results and useful observations.

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