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Hilbert Cube





DEFINITION

Topologically, the Hilbert cube may be defined as the Product of Countably Infinite ly many copies of the Unit Interval {Link without Title} .
That is, it is the Cube of countably infinite Dimension .


THE HILBERT CUBE AS A METRIC SPACE

It's sometimes convenient to think of the Hilbert cube as a Metric Space , indeed as a specific subset of a Hilbert Space with countably infinite dimension.
For these purposes, it's best not to think of it as a product of copies of {Link without Title} , but instead as

: × [0,1/2 × [0,1/3] × ยทยทยท;

for topological properties, this makes no difference.
That is, an element of the Hilbert cube is an Infinite Sequence

:(xn)

that satisfies

:0 ≤ xn ≤ 1/n.

Any such sequence belongs to the Hilbert space l2 , so the Hilbert cube inherits a metric from there.


PROPERTIES

As a product of Compact Hausdorff Space s, the Hilbert cube is itself a compact Hausdorff space as a result of the Tychonoff Theorem .

Since l2 is not Locally Compact , no point has a compact Neighbourhood , so one might expect that all of the compact subsets are finite-dimensional.
The Hilbert cube shows that this is not the case.
But the Hilbert cube fails to be a neighbourhood of any point p because its side becomes smaller and smaller in each dimension, so that an Open Ball around p of any fixed radius e > 0 must go outside the cube in some dimension.


REFERENCES