Let be any sequence in a complete, totally bounded metric space . Cover by finitely many balls of radius ; one contains infinitely many terms. From those terms choose an infinite subsequence lying in one ball of radius , and continue. The diagonal argument produces a subsequence whose tail from its th term onward lies in a ball of radius . Hence
whenever , so the subsequence is Cauchy. Completeness makes it converge in .
Every sequence in therefore has a convergent subsequence, so is sequentially compact. Sequential compactness is equivalent to compactness for metric spaces, and thus is compact. This proves that a complete totally bounded metric space is compact.
A family is equicontinuous if for every and there is a neighborhood of such that
for every and every . The Arzela-Ascoli theorem says that, for a compact Hausdorff space , a subset of has compact closure in the uniform norm if and only if it is equicontinuous and pointwise bounded. On compact , equicontinuity and pointwise boundedness together imply uniform boundedness.
For necessity, a compact closure is totally bounded. Given , choose a finite -net . The finitely many continuous functions are simultaneously continuous near each point, and comparison with a nearby proves equicontinuity of the whole family. Evaluation at any fixed point is a continuous map or , so compactness also gives pointwise boundedness.
Conversely, equicontinuity gives, around each , a neighborhood on which every oscillates by less than . Compactness supplies a finite such cover with selected points . Pointwise boundedness makes the set of vectors
a bounded subset of a finite-dimensional normed vector space, so it has a finite -net. Choose one function of for every nonempty cell of this net. If two functions have evaluation vectors in the same cell, then comparison at a selected and the two oscillation bounds show that their uniform distance is less than . Thus is totally bounded. Since is a Banach space, its closure is complete; a complete totally bounded metric space is compact, proving the theorem.