Additive Functions

I’ve got internet access again, but I’m busy with a few things today, like assembling my furniture. Luckily, Tim Gowers has a post on “How to use Zorn’s lemma”. His example is the construction of additive (not linear) functions from to itself.

In practice, as he points out, this is equivalent to defining linear functions (not just additive) from to itself, if we’re considering as a vector space over the field of rational numbers! This is a nifty little application within the sort of stuff we’ve been doing lately, and it really explains how we used Zorn’s Lemma when we showed that every vector space has a basis.