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Exercise 1.3 (Well-definedness of simple integral)
Suppose that an unsigned simple function has two representations as the linear combination of indicator functions:
where , lie in , and are measurable sets. Show that
Answers
We use a Venn diagram argument.
Lemma 1. (Venn diagram argument) Let be sets. Then they partition into disjoint sets, each of which is an intersection of or the complement for .
Proof. We use induction.
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For the case we have the collection of sets:
It is easy to verify that all of the above sets are pairwise disjoint and their union is indeed.
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Now suppose inductively that the theorem assertion is true for , i.e, we have the set of cardinality consisting of all intersection of . Then it is easy to verify that the set can be written as
The elements of are disjoint since the elements of are, and it is a partition of of cardinality , as desired.
Thus, consider the disjoint sets of the collection constructed as above. We throw away any sets that are empty, leaving us with a partition of into non-empty disjoint sets for some . As the and their complements are measurable, the are too. By construction, each of the arise as unions of some of the , thus we can write
for all and , and some subsets . By finite additivity of measure, we thus have
Thus, our objective is now to show that
To obtain this, we fix and evaluate . At such point, is equal to , and similarly is equal to . From this, we conclude that
Multiplying this by and then summing over all we obtain the theorem assertion.