KKM lemma
1 Preliminaries
We start by introducing some standard notation. is the -dimensional real space with Euclidean norm andmetric. For a subset we denote by the diameter
of .
The -dimensional simplex is the followingsubset of
More generally, if is a set of vectors,then is the simplex spanned by :
Let be the standardorthonormal basis of . So, isthe simplex spanned by . Any element of isrepresented by a vector of coordinates such that ; these are called a barycentric coordinates
of . If theset is in general position then the above representation isunique and we say that is a basis for . If we write then is always a basis.
Let be in , a basis and represented (uniquely) by barycentric coordinates. We denote by thesubset of (i.e., the set of non-null coordinates). Let, the -th face of is the set. A face of is an-face for some (note that this is independent of the choiceof basis).
2 KKM Lemma
The main result we prove is the following:
Theorem 1 (Knaster-Kuratowski-Mazurkiewicz Lemma [1]).
Let be the standard simplex spanned by the standard orthonormal basis for. Assume we have closed subsets of with the property that forevery subset of the following holds: the-th face of is a subset of .Then, the intersection of the sets isnon-empty.
We prove the KKM Lemma by using Sperner’s Lemma; Sperner’s Lemmais based on the notion of simplicial subdivision and coloring.
Definition 2 (Simplicial subdivision of ).
A simplicial subdivision of is a couple; are the vertices, a finite subset of; is a set of simplexes where each is a subset of ofsize . has the following properties:
- 1.
The union of the simplexes in is.
- 2.
If and intersect then theintersection is a face of both and .
The norm of , denoted by , is the diameter of thelargest simplex in .
An -coloring of a subdivision of is a function
A Sperner Coloring of is an -coloring suchthat for every , that is, if is on the -th face then its color is from . For example,if is a subdivision of the standard simplex then the standard basis is a subsetof and . Hence, If is a SpernerColoring of then for all .
Theorem 3 (Sperner’s Lemma).
Let be a simplicial subdivision of and a Sperner Coloringof . Then, there is a simplex such that.
It is a standard result, for example by barycentric subdivisions,that has a sequence of simplicial subdivisions such that . We use this fact to provethe KKM Lemma:
Proof of KKM Lemma.
Let be closed subsets of as given in the lemma. We define the following function as follows:
is well defined by the hypothesis of the lemma and. Also, if then. Let be a sequence of simplicialsubdivisions such that . We set the color of everyvertex in to be . This is a Sperner Coloringsince if is in -fact then . Therefore, by Sperner’s Lemma we have in eachsubdivision a simplex such that. Moreover, .By the properties of for every and every we have that .Let be the arithmetic mean of the elements of (this isan element of and thus an element of ).Since is bounded and closed we get that hasa converging subsequence with a limit . Now,every set is closed, and for every we have anelement of of -distance
from ; thus is in.
Therefore, is in the intersection of all the sets, and that proves the assertion.∎
References
- 1 B. Knaster, C. Kuratowski, and S. Mazurkiewicz, Ein Beweis desFixpunktsatzes für n-dimensionale Simplexe, Fund. Math. 14 (1929) 132-137.