Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-algebra-analysis-and-differential-equations-1-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2012/4/c/solution

Put . This is a closed set. First assume is nonempty. The Heine-Borel theorem makes the nonempty bounded closed set a compact set. By the preceding parts, is a continuous function and is strictly positive at every , because .
The extreme value theorem gives attaining its minimum. Therefore
The equality with the distance between two sets follows by taking the two infima successively. Crucially, compactness supplies a point attaining the minimum; positivity at each point alone would not make an arbitrary infimum positive. This is the principle that a compact subset of an open set has positive distance from its complement.
If , its complement is empty. With the usual extended-real convention , the stated inequality holds in that case too.

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