Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2020 ia Paper 1 10F a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-29
Choose a closed interval containing the bounded sequence. Bisect it and retain a half containing infinitely many terms; repeat. The resulting intervals are nested and their lengths tend to zero. By the nested interval theorem they have one common point , and choosing successively indexed terms from these intervals produces a subsequence converging to . This proves the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2021 ia Paper 1 4F Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
The Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem states that every bounded sequence of real numbers has a convergent subsequence.
For a proof, place all terms in a closed bounded interval . Bisect it and choose a closed half containing infinitely many terms. Continue inductively, choosing nested closed intervalswith infinitely many sequence terms and with lengths tending to zero. Choose such that . The nested interval theorem gives a unique point in every . Because both and lie in ,Thus is a convergent subsequence.
Now suppose every convergent subsequence of the bounded sequence converges to . If did not converge to , there would be an and a subsequence satisfyingfor every . This subsequence is bounded, so Bolzano--Weierstrass gives a convergent subsubsequence. By hypothesis its limit is , contradicting the displayed inequality. Hence the unique subsequential limit of a bounded sequence principle gives