What does compactness actually mean [duplicate]

Solution 1:

The following story may or may not be helpful. Suppose you live in a world where there are two types of animals: Foos, which are red and short, and Bars, which are blue and tall. Naturally, in your language, the word for Foo over time has come to refer to things which are red and short, and the word for Bar over time has come to refer to things which are blue and tall. (Your language doesn't have separate words for red, short, blue, and tall.)

One day a friend of yours tells you excitedly that he has discovered a new animal. "What is it like?" you ask him. He says, "well, it's sort of Foo, but..."

The reason he says it's sort of Foo is that it's short. However, it's not red. But your language doesn't yet have a word for "short," so he has to introduce a new word - maybe "compact"...

The situation with compactness is sort of like the above. It turns out that finiteness, which you think of as one concept (in the same way that you think of "Foo" as one concept above), is really two concepts: discreteness and compactness. You've never seen these concepts separated before, though. When people say that compactness is like finiteness, they mean that compactness captures part of what it means to be finite in the same way that shortness captures part of what it means to be Foo.

But in some sense you've never encountered the notion of compactness by itself before, isolated from the notion of discreteness (in the same way that above you've never encountered the notion of shortness by itself before, isolated from the notion of redness). This is just a new concept and you will to some extent just have to deal with it on its own terms until you get comfortable with it.

Solution 2:

You may read various descriptions and consequences of compactness here. But be aware that compactness is a very subtle finiteness concept. The definitive codification of this concept is a fundamental achievement of $20^{\,\rm th}$ century mathematics.

On the intuitive level, a space is a large set $X$ where some notion of nearness or neighborhood is established. A space $X$ is compact, if you cannot slip away within $X$ without being caught. To be a little more precise: Assume that for each point $x\in X$ a guard placed at $x$ could survey a certain, maybe small, neighborhood of $x$. If $X$ is compact then you can do with finitely many (suitably chosen) guards.

Solution 3:

I answered a very similar question here.

Recapitulating:

Compactness does for continuous functions what finiteness does for functions in general.

If a set $A$ is finite then every function $f:A\to \mathbb R$ has a max and a min, and every function $f:A\to\mathbb R^n$ is bounded. If $A$ is compact, the every continuous function from $A$ to $\mathbb R$ has a max and a min and every continuous function from $A$ to $\mathbb R^n$ is bounded.

If $A$ is finite then every sequence of members of $A$ has a subsequence that is eventually constant, and "eventually constant" is the only kind of convergence you can talk about without talking about a topology on the set. If $A$ is compact, then every sequence[ net ] of members of $A$ has a convergent subsequence.

Solution 4:

The definition of compactness that reads: "every cover has a finite subcover" is most directly related to the idea that being compact is, in some sense, like being finite: compact sets share with finite sets the property that every cover has a finite subcover. It is a concept that takes some time getting used to, so at first proofs of/with it may look weird.

Compactness in $\mathbb R^n$ is equivalent to being closed and bounded. This again is a property shared with finite sets: any finite set in $\mathbb R^n$ is closed and bounded. Also, in a metric space, a set is compact if, and only if, every sequence in it has a convergent subsequences. Again, a property that holds for finite sets: Every sequence in a finite set contains a convergent subsequence.

Finally, there is a less straightforward analogy using nonstandard analysis. A set is compact if, and only if, every point in its enlargement is near-standard. Intuitively, an enlargement of a set is obtained by adding new points generated from the set. Being near-standard means a new point is infinitesimally close to an already existing point in the set. For a finite set, the enlargement is equal to the set, so every point in the enlargement is simply equal to some point from the set. So again, this is a property shared with compact sets: a set is compact if every point in the enlargement is infinitesimally close to some point from the set.