Compactness. Part 1: Degrees of freedom

Preamble
This series of posts has its genesis in a couple questions posted on MathOverflow.net. It is taking me a bit longer to write this than expected: I am not entirely sure what level of an audience I should address the post to. Another complication is that it is hard to get ideas organized when I am only writing about this during downtime where I hit a snag in research. The main idea that I want to get to is “a failure of sequential compactness of a domain represents the presence of some sort of infinity.” In this first post I will motivate the definition of compactness in mathematics.

Introduction
We start with the pigeonhole principle: “If one tries to stuff pigeons into pigeonholes, and there are more pigeons than there are pigeonholes, then at least one hole is shared by multiple pigeons.” This can be easily generalized the the case where there are infinitely many pigeons, which is the version we will use

Pigeonhole principle. If one tries to stuff infinitely many pigeons into a finite number of pigeonholes, then at least one hole is occupied by infinitely many pigeons.

Now imagine being the pigeon sorter: I hand you a pigeon, you put it into a pigeonhole. However you sort the pigeons, you are making a (infinite) sequence of assignments of pigeons to pigeonholes. Mathematically, you represent a sequence of points (choices) in a finite set (the list of all holes). In this example, we will say that a point in the set of choices is a cluster point relative to a sequence of choices if that particular point is visited infinitely many times. A mathematical way of formulating the pigeonhole principle then is:

Let S be a finite set. Let (a_n) be a sequence of points in S. Then there exist some point p \in S such that p is a cluster point of (a_n).

The key here is the word finite: if you have an infinitely long row of pigeonholes (say running to the right of you), and I keep handing you pigeons, as long as you keep stepping to the right after stuffing a pigeon into a hole, you can keep a “one pigeon per hole (or fewer)” policy. Read the rest of this entry »