At the end of last lecture we defined club sets and showed that the diagonal intersection of club subsets of a regular cardinal is club.
Definition 10. Let be a limit ordinal of uncountable cofinality. The set
is stationary in
iff
for all club sets
For example, let be a regular cardinal strictly smaller than
Then
is a stationary set, since it contains the
-th member of the increasing enumeration of any club in
This shows that whenever
there are disjoint stationary subsets of
Below, we show a stronger result. The notion of stationarity is central to most of set theoretic combinatorics.
Fact 11. Let be stationary in
is unbounded in
- Let
be club in
Then
is stationary.
Proof. 1. must meet
for all
and is therefore unbounded.
2. Given any club sets and
and it follows that
is stationary.
Continuing with the intuition that a club subset of is large, we should think of stationary sets as being those that are not small. Thinking in terms of measure theory may be helpful: A club set is like a set of full measure, and a stationary set is like a set of positive measure. Clearly, we cannot have disjoint full measure sets, this corresponds to the fact that the intersection of two clubs is club. However, it is possible to have disjoint stationary sets. It is because of this fact that last lecture I made the comment that stationary sets are a manifestation of the axiom of choice: It is consistent with
(for example, it is a consequence of determinacy) that every stationary subset of
contains a club. However, under choice any stationary subset of an ordinal
of cofinality
can be split into
many disjoint stationary subsets. This is a result of Solovay. For
or, in general, for any successor cardinal, this was known prior to Solovay’s theorem; it is a consequence of a nice construction due to Ulam.
Definition 12. Let be a cardinal. An Ulam matrix on
is defined as follows: For each
fix an injection
. For
and
define
For define
The following observations are immediate from the definition:
- If
then
for any
- If
then
for any
since the
are injective.
for each
It follows from 3. and Theorem 7 that for each
in fact,
contains a club. It follows from the pigeonhole principle that for some
the set
has size
This shows that there are many disjoint stationary subsets of
In fact, more is true: Given
stationary, by replacing each
with
the same argument shows:
Theorem 13. (Ulam). For each any stationary subset of
can be split into
many disjoint stationary sets.
A little argument with the pigeonhole principle shows that, for every
has size at most
and therefore for all but boundedly many
is unbounded in
Question 14. Are there many values of
such that
?
Of course, the answer to Question 14 is yes if is regular.
We are now ready to provide a very useful characterization of stationary sets due to Fodor.
Definition 13. Let be a set of ordinals. A function
is regressive iff
for all
Theorem 14. (Fodor). Suppose that is stationary in the regular cardinal
and
is a regressive function. Then there is some
such that
is stationary.
Proof. Otherwise, for each there is a club
disjoint from
Let
so
is club by Lemma 9. Let
For all
so
Therefore,
and
is not regressive. Contradiction.
Corollary 15.Let be an uncountable regular cardinal and let
The following are equivalent:
is stationary.
- For every regressive function
on
there is some
such that
is unbounded.
- For every regressive function
on
there is some
such that
is stationary.
- For every function
on
there is some stationary subset of
where
is constant, or else there is a stationary subset of
where
is strictly increasing.
Proof. Clearly 3. implies 2., and 1. implies 3. by Theorem 14. Assume that is not stationary, and let
be a club set disjoint from
For every
larger than
the set
is nonempty and bounded below
so it has a largest element. The map that assigns to
this largest element is regressive on
By mapping every other
(if any) to
the map extends to a regressive function on
However, the preimage of every point in its range is bounded. This proves that 2. implies 1.
Obviously, 4. implies 1. Suppose that is stationary in
that
and that
is not stationary. Let
so
is stationary and
for all
By induction, define a sequence
such that
for all
for all
and in fact
whenever
and
whenever
is a limit ordinal.
(Whenever condition 5 holds in a sequence, we say that the sequence is continuous. If condition 3 holds, this indeed corresponds to the enumeration map being continuous in the order topology.)
That we can satisfy requirements 1–5 follows from the regularity of By construction,
is a club subset of
and therefore
is stationary. By construction,
whenever
and
This shows that 4. holds.
Remark 16. If has uncountable cofinality but is not a regular cardinal, it is not necessarily true that every regressive function on every stationary subset of
is constant on a stationary subset. However, a weak version of Fodor’s lemma still holds in this case, namely, for any
stationary in
and any regressive
there is some stationary subset of
in which
is bounded. The proof is an easy extension of the argument for Theorem 14.
Note that the collection of subsets of that contain a club forms a
-complete filter (the club filter), and the collection of nonstationary sets forms a
-complete ideal (the nonstationary ideal).
Before stating Silver’s result, we need one additional result. Recall that was introduced last lecture in Definition 4, it is the statement that
for all infinite cardinals
We break the result into two parts, Lemmas 17 and 18, corresponding respectively to Theorems II.1.9 (describing the behavior of the exponential
) and II.1.10 (describing the computation of powers
) from lecture II.2.
Lemma 17.Assume Let
be singular and let
Then
Proof. Assume let
be singular and let
be as in the statement of the lemma. By the Bukovský-Hechler theorem, if
is eventually constant below
then
and otherwise,
By
we have that
since we are assuming that
Lemma 18.Assume Let
be infinite. Then
Proof. Now we use Theorem II.1.10. Assume We argue by induction on
that the formula holds for all
If
then
as before.
Let If
and
then
where the induction hypothesis is used in the last inequality.
Suppose now that and
If
is not eventually constant below
then
by
Otherwise,
is eventually constant below
If
is sufficiently large, then we have that
and
where the last inequality is by the induction hypothesis, and we are done.
Corollary 19. holds iff
for all infinite cardinals
What the results say is that makes all powers as small as possible modulo the size of the exponential function
Notice that the arguments we gave are local, meaning that the computations hold at some
assuming only that
holds up to
Definition 20. (Shelah). Let be a cardinal. A cardinal
is
-inaccessible iff
for all cardinals
The following is a fairly general statement of Silver’s result (still some additional generality is possible). I’ll present some corollaries and explain how they follow from the theorem. Then I will prove in detail a (very) particular case which, however, contains all the required ingredients for the proof of the general result. The argument I present is due to Baumgartner and Prikry and is combinatorial in nature. Silver’s original proof used the technique of forcing and depended on a generic ultrapower argument. We will see a similar (forceless) argument in Section 4, in the context of large cardinals. For the original approach, see Jack Silver, On the singular cardinals problem, in Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (Vancouver, B. C., 1974), Vol. 1, . Canad. Math. Congress, Montreal, Que., 1975, 265–268.
Theorem 21. (Silver).
- Let
be a cardinal. Assume that
and
is
-inaccessible. Let
be a strictly increasing and continuous sequence of cardinals cofinal in
Suppose that there is some
such that
is stationary in
Then
- In the situation of item 1., if in addition
for all
then
- If
is a strong limit singular cardinal of uncountable cofinality, and
is stationary in
then
Corollary 22. (Silver).
- Let
be a singular strong limit cardinal of uncountable cofinality
Let
be a strictly increasing and continuous sequence of cardinals cofinal in
Suppose that
and
is stationary. Then
- Let
be a singular cardinal of uncountable cofinality
and let
If
is stationary, then
- Suppose that
and
is stationary. Then
- Suppose that
is strong limit, and
is stationary. Then
- Suppose that
and
is stationary. Then
- The first counterexample to
is not a singular cardinal of uncountable cofinality
- The first counterexample to
is not a singular cardinal of uncountable cofinality.
Proof. 1. This follows immediately from the theorem, using that since
is strong limit.
2. Note that is strong limit: If
then
since
It follows that
for unboundedly many, and therefore for all,
Let be a strictly increasing continuous sequence of cardinals cofinal in
Then
is stationary in
But for all
Now the result follows from 1.
3. For all
by Tarski’s formula, Homework problem 8 from lecture II.3. It follows that
for stationarily many
But, for any countable limit ordinal
we have that
The result now follows from the theorem.
4. By 3., since is strong limit.
5. and 6. By 2.
7. Suppose that holds below
that
is singular, and that
is uncountable. Suppose first that
Then in fact
since
We then have that
and
also holds at
Suppose now that We claim that in fact
is
-inaccessible. Assume that this is the case, and fix a strictly increasing and continuous sequence of cardinals
converging to
For any limit ordinal
we have that
By
below
as long as
is sufficiently large to ensure that
(We are using Corollary 19 here, more precisely, the fact that Corollary 19 has a local proof as explained above.)
It follows that Theorem 21.1 applies, with and therefore
and
also holds at
as wanted.
All that remains is to argue that is indeed
-inaccessible. For this, suppose that
Using
below
by (the local nature of the proof of) Corollary 19 we have that
and we are done.
Now I state and prove the best known particular case of Silver’s result.
Corollary 23. (Silver). is not the first counterexample to
Proof. Suppose that for all
In what follows, by
we mean the set product (the collection of functions) rather than its cardinality, and similarly for other products. Fix injections
for all
For
let
be the map
Set
The following properties of are immediate:
- Whenever
there is in fact an
such that
for all countable
since the assignment
is 1-1.
Whenever a collection of functions
satisfies 1., we will say that
is almost disjoint.
Lemma 24. Suppose that is almost disjoint, and for all
the set
is stationary in
Then
Proof. Given define
so that
for all
Then
is regressive in a stationary set. By Fodor’s lemma (Theorem 14), there is some
such that
is stationary.
For and
let
Then either
is empty, or else the map that assigns to
its restriction
is injective, since
is almost disjoint and
is stationary in
and therefore unbounded.
By definition of if
then
But then it follows from
that
The result follows, since and there are only
many possible values of
and
many possible values of
Corollary 25. Let and let
be almost disjoint. Suppose that for all
is stationary. Then
Proof. This is immediate from the lemma since injects into
To complete the proof of the theorem, we now argue that can be split into
many sets to which the corollary applies.
Definition 26. Let be the club filter on
Given functions
we say that
iff
contains a club.
Suppose that Then, by Corollary 22, at most
many functions in
are below
on a stationary set, i.e.,
for all but at most
many functions
By induction, we can therefore define a -increasing sequence
of members of
. But notice that for any
it is the case that
for some
Otherwise,
contradicts the previous paragraph. It follows that
where
and we are done by Corollary 22.
The arguments above (see the proof of Corollary 22.7, for example) suggest that guarantees that Tarski’s conjecture (see lecture II.3) holds. This easily follows from Lemma 18. We can in fact say a bit more:
Homework problem 9. (Jech-Shelah). Assume that Tarski’s conjecture fails, so for some limit ordinal there is some strictly increasing sequence of cardinals
with limit
such that
- Show that
and there is some cardinal
such that
- Suppose that
is least such that there is a counterexample as above. Then (
and)
- If Tarski’s conjecture fails, then there is a cardinal
of uncountable cofinality
such that
for all
and
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