ECOS2903 Tutorial 1: Sets and Functions

11 February 2022

Please try your best to solve these questions before coming to the tutorial.
For the questions marked with ∗, you will be invited to share your thoughts (even if you could
not solve them entirely), and we will discuss them in detail. For the other questions, we may invite
you to share your answers with your classmates and we may not go over them in detail in class if
we run out of time.
Q1 Any finite intersection of open sets is open.
Hint: Don’t know where to start? The last exercise in Tutorial 0 will give you some clue.

Q2* A set S ⊆ Rn is closed if and only if its complement, Sc = Rn \ S, is open.

Note: To prove an “A if and only if B” statement, you need to prove both “A ⇒ B (only if)”
and “B ⇒ A (if)”.

Quiz A road map for the proof of Q2

1. Which of the following statement is equivalent to “S is closed ⇒ Sc is open”? The correct

answer will help us construct a proof by contrapositive.
(a) If some boundary point of Sc is not contained in Sc , then S must contain some of
its boundary points.
(b) If Sc contains some of its boundary points, then some boundary point of S is not
contained in S.
(c) If some boundary point of S is not contained in S, then Sc must contain some of its
boundary points.
(d) If S does not contain any of its boundary points, then Sc must contain some of its
boundary points.
2. Which of the following statement is equivalent to “Sc is open ⇒ S is closed”? The correct
answer will help us construct a proof by contradiction.
(a) If S contains all of its boundary points and Sc contains some of its boundary points,
then we must arrive at a contradiction.
(b) If S contains all of its boundary points but some boundary point of Sc is not con-
tained in Sc , then we must arrive at a contradiction.
(c) If Sc does not contain any of its boundary points but S contains some of its boundary
points, then we must arrive at a contradiction.

1
 (d) If Sc does not contain any of its boundary points and some boundary point of S is
not contained in S, then we must arrive at a contradiction.

Please discuss these questions with your classmates and submit your answer to “T1 quiz” on
Canvas.

Q3 Take the statements from Q1 and Q2 as given (even though you haven’t figured out how to
prove them). Can you use these two statements to prove the following?
“Any finite union of closed sets in closed.”

Q4 Are these functions?

1. f : (0, ∞) → R s.t. f (x) = ln x

2. f : R → (0, ∞) s.t. f (x) = ln x

Q5 Let f be a function with domain A and range B. f has an inverse function if there exists a
function f −1 with domain B and range A such that:
for each y in B, the value f −1 (y) is the unique number in A such that f f −1 (y) = y, i.e.,

f −1 (y) = x if and only if y = f (x) (x ∈ A, y ∈ B).

In cases 1 and 2 below, does f have an inverse function? If so, what is the domain and the
rule of its inverse function? If not, please explain why.

1. f : [0, 1] → R s.t. f (x) = 30x3 .

2. f : R → R s.t. f (x) = x2 .

Q6* In general, a function f has an inverse function if and only if it is “one-to-one”: there do not
exist two points x1 , x2 in the domain such that x1 6= x2 but f (x1 ) = f (x2 ).
Can you use this condition to prove that a strictly increasing function f must have an inverse
function?