Nets and Reverse Mathematics, a pilot study

Abstract

Nets are generalisations of sequences involving possibly uncountable index sets; this notion was introduced about a century ago by Moore and Smith. They also established the generalisation to nets of various basic theorems of analysis due to Bolzano-Weierstrass, Dini, Arzela, and others. More recently, nets are central to the development of domain theory, providing intuitive definitions of the associated Scott and Lawson topologies, among others. This paper deals with the Reverse Mathematics study of basic theorems about nets. We restrict ourselves to nets indexed by subsets of Baire space, and therefore third-order arithmetic, as such nets suffice to obtain our main results. Over Kohlenbach's base theory of higher-order Reverse Mathematics, the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem for nets implies the Heine-Borel theorem for uncountable covers. We establish similar results for other basic theorems about nets and even some equivalences, e.g. for Dini's theorem for nets. Finally, we show that replacing nets by sequences is hard, but that replacing sequences by nets can obviate the need for the Axiom of Choice, a foundational concern in domain theory. In an appendix, we study the power of more general index sets, establishing that the 'size' of a net is directly proportional to the power of the associated convergence theorem.