An-Infinitary-Version-of-Sperner’sLemma.pdfVIP

An Infinitary Version of Sperner’s Lemma Aarno Hohti, University of Helsinki, Finland ABSTRACT. We prove an extension of the well-known combinatorial-topological lemma of E. Sperner [20] to the case of infinite-dimensional cubes. It is obtained as a corollary to an infinitary extension of the Lebesgue Covering Dimension Theo- rem. KEYWORDS. Simplex, colouring, covering dimension, point-finite, fixed point, alge- braic topology AMS 1991 Subject Classification Numbers: Primary 57N20, Secondary 55M20, 54F45. 1. Introduction. The well-known lemma of E. Sperner on colourings of vertices of n-simplices is one of the cornerstones of simplicial algebraic topology, directly related to the invariance of homology groups under simplicial subdivisions. It was used by Sperner [20] to give a short proof that the topological dimension of an n-cell equals n. In fact, it can be considered a combinatorial (discrete) version of Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem, obtained from Sperner’s Lemma by a simple argument using the compactness of the cubes In , as shown in [8]. There are several versions and extensions of this lemma ([2], [6], [12], [15], [21], [24]) and there are versions for matroids ([11], [13], [14]). The well-known extension of Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem to infinite-dimensional (Banach) spaces, Schauder’s Fixed Point Theorem, is stated for compact convex subsets and is based on the finite-dimensional theorem. Indeed, there is no “truly” infinitary Sperner lemma in the literature, and this is connected with the facts that Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem fails in general (see e. g. [1]) and the ordinary homology groups Hn (U, Z) vani