Compactness implies total boundedness: Let (X,d)(X,d) be a and let K⊆XK\subseteq X be . Then KK is : for every ε>0\varepsilon>0 there exists a finite set F⊆KF\subseteq K such that

K⊆⋃x∈FB(x,ε),K\subseteq \bigcup_{x\in F} B(x,\varepsilon),

where B(x,ε)B(x,\varepsilon) denotes the .

Remarks

This is one half of the standard metric characterization , complementing and closely related to the existence of finite .