Composing two discontinuous functions

Calculus Level 2

If f , g : R R f,g:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R} are two discontinuous functions, is their composition f g f\circ{g} necessarily also discontinuous?

No Yes

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1 solution

Anton Wu
Dec 18, 2017

A simple counterexample shows that f g f\circ{g} is not necessarily discontinuous.

Let f = 1 Q = g f={\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}}=g , where 1 Q {\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}} is the indicator function for the rational numbers , defined by: 1 Q ( x ) = { 1 , x Q 0 , x ∉ Q {\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}}(x)=\begin{cases} 1,&x\in\mathbb{Q} \\ 0,&x\not\in\mathbb{Q} \\ \end{cases} It is well-known that 1 Q ( x ) {\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}}(x) is discontinuous at all x x , but ( 1 Q 1 Q ) ( x ) \left({\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}}\circ{\textbf{1}}_{\mathbb{Q}}\right)(x) is clearly the function that outputs 1 1 for all x x , and thus the composition is continuous.

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