English

Finding subsets of positive measure

Logic 2014-08-12 v1

Abstract

An important theorem of geometric measure theory (first proved by Besicovitch and Davies for Euclidean space) says that every analytic set of non-zero ss-dimensional Hausdorff measure Hs\mathcal H^s contains a closed subset of non-zero (and indeed finite) Hs\mathcal H^s-measure. We investigate the question how hard it is to find such a set, in terms of the index set complexity, and in terms of the complexity of the parameter needed to define such a closed set. Among other results, we show that given a (lightface) Σ11\Sigma^1_1 set of reals in Cantor space, there is always a Π10(O)\Pi^0_1(\mathcal{O}) subset on non-zero Hs\mathcal H^s-measure definable from Kleene's O\mathcal O. On the other hand, there are Π20\Pi^0_2 sets of reals where no hyperarithmetic real can define a closed subset of non-zero measure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.1999,
  title  = {Finding subsets of positive measure},
  author = {Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen and Jan Reimann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.1999},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

This is an extended journal version of the conference paper "The Strength of the Besicovitch--Davies Theorem". The final publication of that paper is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13962-8_26

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:23:44.450Z