THE REAL LINE
1.3 THE REAL LINE One of our objectives is to develop rigorously the concepts of limit, continuity, differentiability, and integrability, which you have seen in calculus. To do this requires a better understanding of the real numbers than is provided in calculus. The purpose of this section is to develop this understanding. Since the utility of the concepts introduced here will not become apparent until we are well into the study of limits and continuity, you should reserve judgment on their value until they are applied. As this occurs, you should reread the applicable parts of this section. This applies especially to the concept of an open covering and to the Heine–Borel and Bolzano–Weierstrass theorems, which will seem mysterious at first. We assume that you are familiar with the geometric interpretation of the real numbers as points on a line. We will not prove that this interpretation is legitimate, for two reasons: (1) the proof requires an excursion into the foundations of Euc