Club filter 2026-10-06
On a regular uncountable cardinal number , the club filter consists of all subsets containing a club set. It is a kappa-complete filter by club filter completeness. Its members are stationary sets, although a stationary set need not be a filter member, and a filter member need not itself be closed.
Filtration form of Fodor lemma 2026-10-06
If is stationary and for a kappa-filtration, then is constant on a stationary subset. Restrict to limit indices and use continuity to find a smaller stage containing each value. Fodor lemma fixes that stage on a stationary subset. Its size is less than , so club filter completeness makes one value fiber stationary.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 19 2 iv Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Let . This set is stationary: in any club set, choose a strictly increasing countable sequence and take its supremum, which lies in the club set and has cofinality . For each choose an increasing cofinal sequence .
Fix . For every above , some exceeds . Partition this stationary tail by the least such . A countable union of nonstationary sets is nonstationary, because fewer than club sets have club filter completeness, so some cell is stationary. On it the regressive function has, by Fodor lemma, a stationary fiber at a value .
Let . The preceding argument says is unbounded in . Since , at least one is unbounded and therefore has size . Its fibers are pairwise disjoint stationary sets. Enumerate of them as , , and define for , whileAdding a remainder preserves stationarity and introduces no overlap. ConsequentlyThis proves the stationary partition by cofinal-sequence fibers directly for every regular uncountable .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 121 3 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
The club filter completeness argument works for every regular uncountable . Let and let be a club set for each . Their intersection is closed. To prove it unbounded, start above any prescribed and choose an increasing sequence so that lies above a chosen point of every greater than . is a regular cardinal, so the supremum of these choices remains below . The resulting countable supremum likewise remains below . For each , the chosen points are cofinal in , so closure gives . Thus the intersection is a club set. Intersecting fewer than members of the club filter still contains such an intersection of clubs. In particular, .
It is not an ultrafilter. For a regular infinite , the setis stationary. Given a club set , build in a strictly increasing continuous sequence of length and take its supremum . Closure gives , and the cofinality of an increasing ordinal supremum gives . This proves the stationarity of ordinals of prescribed cofinality.
At , the disjoint sets and are both stationary. A club contained in either or its complement would miss one of these stationary sets. Thus neither nor its complement belongs to , and