Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2015 / iii / Paper 24 / 2 / a

A Suslin line is a dense linear order without endpoints that is order-complete, has the countable chain condition for a linear order, and is not separable in its order topology. Thus every disjoint family of nonempty open intervals is countable, but there is no countable order-dense subset. The completeness condition says that every nonempty bounded-above subset has a supremum. These requirements distinguish a Suslin line from the real line, which has the countable order-dense subset $\mathbb{Q}$.

A Kurepa tree is a set-theoretic tree of height ${\omega }_1$, with every level countable, possessing at least ${\aleph }_2$ distinct cofinal branches. The predecessors of each node are well ordered; their order type is the node's height. A cofinal branch is a maximal chain with nodes at unbounded heights below ${\omega }_1$, equivalently one node at every level after taking its predecessor closure.

A cofinal map $f:\delta \to \alpha$ has a range cofinal in $\alpha$:For a limit $\alpha$, this is equivalent to $\sup f[\delta ]=\alpha$. For a successor $\alpha$, its largest element must occur in the range. Monotonicity is an additional property and is not part of this definition. The cofinality of $\alpha$ is the least ordinal that admits such a cofinal map into $\alpha$.