Heine-Borel[edit]

I believe that for many, the Heine-Borel theorem is the statement that one can extract from an open covering of [0, 1] a finite subcover. These people (like me) will not understand the lead of this article. I think the writing with Heine-Borel theorem is misleading.

After all, the fact that closed bounded subsets of R^d are compact could be as well called Bolzano-Weierstrass. And Borel was proud to find a finite cover of [0, 1], not to prove that closed and bounded sets are "compact" (he did mention in passing, some years after his covering theorem of 1895, that his covering result extends to closed bounded subsets). --Bdmy (talk) 19:26, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have heard the theorem referred to as the Heine-Borel-Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem. Although I believe that, at least in most contemporary English-language books, the favored term is "Heine-Borel theorem". I am by no means married to the term "Heine-Borel property", however it does have some traction: readers who have learned from contemporary English-language introductory analysis texts will at once recognize the reference to the well-known theorem, and Rudin's text on Functional analysis explicitly uses the term "Heine-Borel property". For what it's worth, siℓℓy rabbit (talk) 19:47, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I give up. But you might have the link pointing closer to the definition of that HB property, in the Heine-Borel Theorem article.

Anyway, I still think that the person who invented this name was wrong, for several reasons. One being that Heine did not invent anything in that specific direction (he says it, in the intro of his famous article, where he claims to be just reporting ideas from Weierstrass, and some from Cantor). Another is that everybody had understood this compactness property of closed bounded subsets (except for the finite subcover) before Borel was old enough to think about math!

Cheers, --Bdmy (talk) 09:15, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]