Order Theory – Dense and Complete Totally Ordered Sets

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The totally ordered set $\mathbb{R}$ has the following properties.

  1. [Density]. Given any two $x,y \in \mathbb{R}$, we can find $\eta \in \mathbb{R}$ such that $x < \eta < y$.

  2. [Dedekind Completeness]. Every non-empty subset that admits an upper bound also admits a supremum.

Adjoining a greatest and/or least element to $\mathbb{R}$ preserves the above properties. This gives us a total of four non-isomorphic totally ordered sets satisfying properties 1 and 2, namely $$(-\infty,\infty),\quad[-\infty,\infty),\quad (-\infty,\infty],\quad [-\infty,\infty].$$

This is probably a silly question, but is the above list exhaustive (up to isomorphism)?

Best Answer

No.

A simple example that doesn't quite work is the total order on $\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}$ defined such that $(a,b) < (c,d)$ if $a<c$ or if $a=c$ and $b<d$. (In other words, uncountably many copies of $\mathbb{R}$, lined up end-to-end.) This is dense and clearly not order-isomorphic to the real line (extended or not), because it contains uncountably many disjoint intervals that are order-isomorphic to the real line (unlike the real line itself, which can contain only countably many of these). However, it is not Dedekind-complete per your definition, because $\{0\}\times\mathbb{R}$ is bounded above (say, by $(1,0)$), but has no least upper bound. This can be repaired by considering $\mathbb{R}\times (\mathbb{R} + \{-\infty,\infty\})$ instead, in which case the supremum of $\{0\}\times \mathbb{R}$ is just $(0,\infty)$; and you are guaranteed greatest lower bounds as well.

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