Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2020 ii Paper 2 22I a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-29
The Baire category theorem says that a complete metric space cannot be a countable union of nowhere dense sets, equivalently that every countable intersection of open dense sets is dense. To prove it, let be open dense subsets and let be nonempty and open. Choose nested closed ballsstarting inside . The centres are a Cauchy sequence; completeness gives a limit lying in every ball, hence in . Thus the intersection is dense.
Choose a countable sequence with . Since for , every with lies in some . For integers , setPointwise convergence and Fatou lemma for series show that is closed in . It has empty interior: inside any ball, add a sufficiently long finite block whose norm is tiny but whose norm is larger than . Therefore every is nowhere dense. Since is a Banach space, Baire gives