Peter Schuster

It is folklore that if a continuous function on a complete metric space has approximate roots and in a uniform manner at most one root, then it actually has a root, which of course is uniquely determined. Also in Bishop's constructive mathematics with countable choice, the general setting of the present note, there is a simple method to validate this heuristic principle. The unique solution even becomes a continuous function in the parameters by a mild modification of the uniqueness hypothesis. Moreover, Brouwer's fan theorem for decidable bars turns out to be equivalent to the statement that, for uniformly continuous functions on a compact metric space, the crucial uniform “at most one” condition follows from its non-uniform counterpart. This classification in the spirit of the constructive reverse mathematics, as propagated by Ishihara and others, sharpens an earlier result obtained jointly with Berger and Bridges

Dini's theorem says that compactness of the domain, a metric space, ensures the uniform convergence of every simply convergent monotone sequence of real-valued continuous functions whose limit is continuous. By showing that Dini's theorem is equivalent to Brouwer's fan theorem for detachable bars, we provide Dini's theorem with a classification in the recently established constructive reverse mathematics propagated by Ishihara. As a complement, Dini's theorem is proved to be equivalent to the analogue of the fan theorem, weak König's lemma, in the original classical setting of reverse mathematics started by Friedman and Simpson

The notions of linear and metric independence are investigated in relation to the property: if U is a set of n+1 independent vectors, and X is a set of n independent vectors, then adjoining some vector in U to X results in a set of n+1 independent vectors. It is shown that this property holds in any normed linear space. A related property – that finite-dimensional subspaces are proximinal – is established for strictly convex normed spaces over the real or complex numbers. It follows that metric independence and linear independence are equivalent in such spaces. Proofs are carried out in the context of intuitionistic logic without the axiom of countable choice.

How are the various classically equivalent definitions of compactness for metric spaces constructively interrelated? This question is addressed with Bishop-style constructive mathematics as the basic system – that is, the underlying logic is the intuitionistic one enriched with the principle of dependent choices. Besides surveying today's knowledge, the consequences and equivalents of several sequential notions of compactness are investigated. For instance, we establish the perhaps unexpected constructive implication that every sequentially compact separable metric space is totally bounded. As a by-product, the fan theorem for detachable bars of the complete binary fan proves to be necessary for the unit interval possessing the Heine-Borel property for coverings by countably many possibly empty open balls