Paper 1, Section II, G

Metric and Topological Spaces
Part IB, 2011

Let XX be a metric space with the distance function d:X×XRd: X \times X \rightarrow \mathbb{R}. For a subset YY of XX, its diameter is defined as δ(Y):=sup{d(y,y)y,yY}\delta(Y):=\sup \left\{d\left(y, y^{\prime}\right) \mid y, y^{\prime} \in Y\right\}.

Show that, if XX is compact and {Uλ}λΛ\left\{U_{\lambda}\right\}_{\lambda \in \Lambda} is an open covering of XX, then there exists an ϵ>0\epsilon>0 such that every subset YXY \subset X with δ(Y)<ϵ\delta(Y)<\epsilon is contained in some UλU_{\lambda}.