Any subset of integers with upper/lower bound has maximum/minimum

elementary-number-theorynumber theorysupremum-and-infimum

Theorem

Let $A$ be a nonempty subset of integer numbers. Then, if $A$ has an upper/lower bound then it has maximum/minimum too.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to prove the theorem: in particular I attempted to prove that the statement is true for $\Bbb N$ and then I tried to use the results for which $\Bbb N$ is isomorphic to $\Bbb Z^+$ so that the theorem holds for $\Bbb Z^+$ and so for $\Bbb Z^-$ too since there exist an anti-isomorphism between $\Bbb Z^+$ and $\Bbb Z^-$ but I have some difficulties to do this. Then I also tried to prove the statement with reductio ad absurdum as I show to follow: e.g. if $A$ has an upper bound $n$ and has not maximum then for any $x\in A$ there exist $y\in A$ such that $x<y\le n$ but $[y,n]$ is finite and so this implies that $n\in A$ but this is impossible because this would means that $n$ is not an upper bound for $A$; then a similar result holds for the case where $A$ has a lower bound. But I am not sure about the correctness of my proof attempts. So could someone help me?

Best Answer

Suppose that you’ve shown that every non-empty bounded subset of $\Bbb N$ has a maximum element. Let $A$ be a non-empty bounded set of integers, and let $n$ be a lower bound for $A$. Then $A+n=\{a+n:a\in A\}$ is a bounded subset of $\Bbb N$ and therefore has maximum element $m$; show that $m-n=\max A$.

Next, $-A=\{-a:a\in A\}$ is a bounded set of integers (why?), so it has a maximum element $m$, and it’s not hard to show that $-m=\min A$. Thus, it all boils down to showing that every non-empty bounded subset of $\Bbb N$ has a maximum element.

To show that every bounded subset of $\Bbb N$ has a maximum element, suppose that $A\subseteq\Bbb N$ is non-empty and bounded. Let

$$B=\{k\in\Bbb N:k\text{ is an upper bound for }A\}\,;$$

by hypothesis $B\ne\varnothing$, so $B$ has a least element $m$. Show that if $m\notin A$, then $m-1\in B$, contradicting the choice of $m$.