Dedekind Cuts Most people think of real numbers as decimal expansions like 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582 09749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679....... (also known as ).

. That is ne as long as you remember things like 1.2345679999999.... =1.234568. However, it turns out to be awkward for proving some properties of the real numbers. In particular, it is a dicult denition to use when you prove that real numbers have the least upper bound property. In the late 19th century (around 1870) R. Dedekind found a denition for the real numbers that is convenient for such proofs. The idea in Dedekinds denition is to identify a real number r with the set of all rational numbers strictly less than r. It is pretty easy to describe the sets of rational numbers that arise this way: a) They are neither empty nor all the rational numbers. b) They include all rationals less than any rational that they contain. c) They never have a largest element. So one makes a)-c) the denition of a Dedekind cut, i.e. A set S of rational numbers is a Dedekind cut, if and only if a) S = and S = Q, and b) if S and < , then S , and c) if S , then there is a S such that > . Next one proceeds to dene the addition and multiplication of Dedekind cuts, and one makes the denition that a cut r and a cut s satisfy r < s if and only if the set r of rational numbers is a strictly smaller subset of the set s of rational numbers. Then one has to prove that these denitions make Dedekind cuts an ordered eld with all the properties on pages 21-22 of Stoll. This takes several pages in a textbook (see Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, pp. 17-21). Finally one shows that the set of Dedekind cuts can be identied with decimal expansions. To justify introducing Dedekind cuts here is the proof that a nonempty set S of cuts which is bounded above has a least upper bound. Dene L = rS r This means that B is the set of all rational numbers which are contained in the cuts in S remember each cut is a set of rationals. I claim that i) L is a cut, and ii) L is the least upper bound of S . To check i) note that L is nonempty because S is nonempty set of cuts and cuts are nonempty sets of rationals. Also L is not all of Q because we are given that S is bounded above: that means that there is a cut B such that each r in S is a subset of B . So L is a subset of B , and B is not all of Q because it is a cut. Thus L satises a). To see that L has properties b) and c) suppose L. Then r for some r S . If < , then r, too, because r is a cut. Thus L, and 1

L has property b). Also, since r is a cut, there is a r such that > . Thus L, and L has property c). Thus we have proven claim i), L is a cut. To prove ii) note that L is an upper bound for S just from the way we dened it: clearly r S implies either r = L or r L which means r L. To see that L is the least upper bound suppose that it is not. Then we would have a cut L < L which was still an upper bound. But then there would be a rational number in L which is not in L . Since L implies r for some r S , we conclude that L cannot be greater than or equal to r. So L is not an upper bound. This contradiction proves that L is the least upper bound, and we are done.