## Archive for August 12th, 2008

### How to use Zorn’s lemma

August 12, 2008

I am continuing my series of sample articles for the Tricks Wiki with one that is intended to represent a general class of such articles. It is common practice in lecture courses (at least if the ones I attended as an undergraduate are anything to go by) to state useful theorems, lemmas, propositions, etc., without going to much trouble to explain why they are useful. Of course, there are many ways to pick up this further understanding: taking note of where and how such results are used, doing carefully designed exercises, and so on. Nevertheless, it is often the case that more could be done to help people recognise the signs that indicate that a particular result can be applied.

This article, which is principally aimed at undergraduates early on in a mathematics degree, is inspired by an experience I myself had as an undergraduate. I had a sheet of challenging problems (set by Béla Bollobás) and one of them completely stumped me. (I’m sure several of them stumped me but this is the one that sticks in my mind.) I can’t remember exactly what the question was, but it was something of similar difficulty to that of determining whether an additive function from $\mathbb{R}$ to $\mathbb{R}$ was necessarily linear. My supervision partner solved the problem using Zorn’s lemma, which we had been told about in a lecture, and I just sat there in disbelief because it hadn’t even remotely occurred to me that Zorn’s lemma might be useful. At some point in the intervening years, I “got” Zorn’s lemma and now find it straightforward to see where it is needed. This article is intended to speed up that process for other people. (more…)