ERDŐS–LIOUVILLE SETS

Abstract

AbstractIn 1844, Joseph Liouville proved the existence of transcendental numbers. He introduced the set $\mathcal L$ of numbers, now known as Liouville numbers, and showed that they are all transcendental. It is known that $\mathcal L$ has cardinality $\mathfrak {c}$ , the cardinality of the continuum, and is a dense $G_{\delta }$ subset of the set $\mathbb {R}$ of all real numbers. In 1962, Erdős proved that every real number is the sum of two Liouville numbers. In this paper, a set W of complex numbers is said to have the Erdős property if every real number is the sum of two numbers in W. The set W is said to be an Erdős–Liouville set if it is a dense subset of $\mathcal {L}$ and has the Erdős property. Each subset of $\mathbb {R}$ is assigned its subspace topology, where $\mathbb {R}$ has the euclidean topology. It is proved here that: (i) there exist $2^{\mathfrak {c}}$ Erdős–Liouville sets no two of which are homeomorphic; (ii) there exist $\mathfrak {c}$ Erdős–Liouville sets each of which is homeomorphic to $\mathcal {L}$ with its subspace topology and homeomorphic to the space of all irrational numbers; (iii) each Erdős–Liouville set L homeomorphic to $\mathcal {L}$ contains another Erdős–Liouville set $L'$ homeomorphic to $\mathcal {L}$ . Therefore, there is no minimal Erdős–Liouville set homeomorphic to $\mathcal {L}$ .