Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/iii/paper-6/2/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 6 2 Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
A point of a convex set is an extreme point if with and forces . It is enough to test midpoints: a nontrivial interior point of a segment is the midpoint of a smaller nontrivial segment.
Here is a proof of the Krein-Milman theorem. The empty-set case is immediate, so take . A face of a convex set is a convex subset such that an interior convex combination lying in has both endpoints in . Consider nonempty compact faces. They include . Every inclusion chain has nonempty intersection, because its closed subsets of the compact set have the finite intersection property. The intersection remains a compact face. The Zorn lemma, ordered by reverse inclusion, therefore supplies a minimal nonempty compact face .
If contains two distinct points, the Hausdorff locally convex hypotheses and the allowed separation theorem supply a continuous real linear functional taking different values there. Its maximizer set in is nonempty and compact. It is convex, and if a convex combination attains the maximum, both endpoint values attain it too; hence it is a face of . A face of a face is a face of , by applying the defining endpoint property twice. This maximizer face is proper because is nonconstant, contradicting minimality. Thus is a singleton, whose point is extreme in . The same minimal compact face argument inside any nonempty compact face shows that each such face contains an extreme point of .
Let . Since is compact, hence closed in the Hausdorff space, and convex, . It is nonempty, closed and convex. If , the allowed strict separation theorem supplies a continuous linear functional withThe maximizer face of on contains an extreme point by the preceding argument. Then but , a contradiction. ThereforeAll closures refer to the given locally convex topology, and compactness is what justified both maxima and chain intersections.
For the real l-infinity sequence space, if for any coordinate, choose . The two distinct sequences belong to the closed unit ball and have midpoint , so is not extreme. Conversely, if every is one or minus one, writing for unit-ball sequences forces at every coordinate, because an endpoint of cannot be a nontrivial convex average of its points. ThusFor the space of sequences converging to zero, every unit-ball sequence has some coordinate with , since its coordinates tend to zero. The same opposite single-coordinate perturbations still belong to , givingThese are extreme points of real sequence-space unit balls. There is no conflict with Krein-Milman: the norm-closed unit ball of is not compact in the norm topology, as the coordinate vectors have mutual distance one.
New to topics? Read the docs here!