Lambdia

Mathématiques pures

Lambdia a commencé comme une chaîne de maths, et ces articles restent. Ce n'est pas de la préparation d'entretien — ils sont là parce qu'ils valaient d'être écrits.

Every Upper Sum Says One, Every Lower Sum Says Zero, and the Gap Is the Measure of the Discontinuities

On the unit interval the indicator of the rationals has upper sum 1 and lower sum 0 for every partition ever written, so the two never meet and Riemann returns nothing at all. Give the k-th rational an interval of width ε/2^k and the whole countable set sits inside a total length of ε, which puts its measure at 0 and its Lebesgue integral at 0. Lebesgue's criterion turns that into the general law — a bounded function on a compact interval is Riemann integrable exactly when its discontinuities have measure zero — which is why Thomae's function, discontinuous on the same dense set, is integrable and this one is not. The trade is not free: sin x over x on the half line has an improper Riemann value of π/2 and no Lebesgue integral at all.

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