[Math] Cantor Sets Inside Cantor Sets

ca.classical-analysis-and-odesgn.general-topologyreference-request

(Or: "I heard you liked Cantor Sets…")

I'm working on a student project, and the following construction came up very naturally: If $C$ is the usual Cantor Set, build a countable union of copies of this set as follows: start from $C$, and add a one-third scale copy of $C$ in the interval $[1/3,2/3]$, add three one-ninth scale copies of $C$ in the intervals $[1/9, 2/9]$, $[4/9,5/9]$ and $[7/9, 8/9]$, etc.

To Clarify: basically, every time you remove an interval in the classical construction, in this version, you do not remove the whole interval but you replace it with an appropriately scaled copy of the Cantor set. But you also add Cantor sets in the "holes of the holes", so to speak. So that's why in the second stage, there is a copy of $C$ in $[4/9,5/9]$, that fills in the middle third gap that appears in the copy of $C$ that was added at the first stage.

I guess the best way to see it is that at step $n$, you add to the set previously constructed copies of $C$ scaled at $3^{-n}$ in every empty interval where such a copy will fit.

I have my reasons for wanting to look at this construction, but that got me wondering: it looks so natural that it may very well come up in several contexts.

So. Anyone knows where this construction first appeared? Is it especially notable? Does it illustrate any especially interesting property? I would hate to miss something good about it.

Best Answer

The set you are considering, obtained by "filling the gaps" of the Cantor set $C$ by rescaled copies of $C$, is a dense Fσ set of null Lebesgue measure. It may be equivalently described as the invariant superset of $C$ generated by the (non-commuting) mappings $x\mapsto x/3$, $x\mapsto x/3+1/3$, $x\mapsto x/3+2/3$. So, as Andreas says, it can also be described as the set of all points in the unit interval that admit a ternary expansion with finitely many 1's . The complement is a full-measure Gδ set (thus, of course, uncountable: there are uncountably many ways of having infinitely many 1's in one's ternary expansion).

Your construction is customary in the handicraft of examples and counter-examples in Topology and Measure Theory. For instance, a variant of it (with fat Cantor sets) produces a set $S$ that sub-divides any non-empty open set $A$ into two parts of positive measure: $|A\cap S| > 0$ and $|A\setminus S| > 0$.

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