Arch. Math. Logic (1999) 38: 423–447 c Springer-Verlag 1999 The continuum as a formal space Sara Negri1, Daniele Soravia2 1 Department of Philosophy, P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40), 00014 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. e-mail: negri@helsinki.fi 2 Dipartimento di Matematica Pura ed Applicata, Via Belzoni 7, I-35131 Padova, Italy. e-mail:
[email protected] Received: 11 November 1996 Abstract. A constructive definition of the continuum based on formal topol- ogy is given and its basic properties studied. A natural notion of Cauchy sequence is introduced and Cauchy completeness is proved. Other results include elementary proofs of the Baire and Cantor theorems. From a clas- sical standpoint, formal reals are seen to be equivalent to the usual reals. Lastly, the relation of real numbers as a formal space to other approaches to constructive real numbers is determined. 1. Introduction In traditional set-theoretic topology the points of a space are the primitive objects and opens are defined as sets of points. In pointfree topology this conceptual order is reversed and opens are taken as primitive; points are then built as ideal objects consisting of particular, well behaved, collections of opens. The germs of pointfree topology can already be found in some remarks by Whitehead and Russell early in the century. For a detailed account of the historical roots of pointfree topology cf. [J] (notes on ch. II), and [Co]. The basic algebraic structure for pointfree topology is that of frame, or equivalently locale, or complete Heyting algebra, that is, a complete lattice with (finite) meets distributing over arbitrary joins.