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I'm reading Aliprantis and Border's excellent text, Infinite Dimensional Analysis: A Hitchhiker's Guide (PDF available at link, assuming I've done this properly), and I've reached an impasse in the proof of the Urysohn Metrization theorem (3.40, p. 91).

The premises give that $X$ is Hausdorff, and additionally under equivalent statement 3 that $X$ is regular and second countable, so it has a countable base $B$. These conditions also imply by a preceding theorem (2.49, p. 46) that $X$ is normal. For the purposes of the remainder of the proof (which is to show that $X$ can be embedded in the Hilbert cube given regularity and second countability), the authors construct a set $C$ of pairs of nested elements of $B$ such that $C = \{(U,V):\bar{U}\subset V \ \& \ U,V \in B\}$. Then they say, "The normality of $X$ implies that $C$ is nonempty." I've spent considerable time and effort trying to verify this myself, and haven't been able to figure out. It's definitely not a preceding result in this textbook (which is generally very self-contained). And although I've looked around here on Mathoverflow, my topological background might be too weak to see how this is an easy corollary of another theorem.

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    $\begingroup$ There must be more conditions than you've stated here. For example, the discrete space on a countable set X has a countable basis (consisting of the (clopen) singleton sets), but no set A in that basis is a proper subset of any set B in the basis. Note that the discrete topology is Hausdorff and normal. $\endgroup$
    – Apollo
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 20:46
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    $\begingroup$ @Apollo I suppose the inclusion is not meant to be strict, so that if $U$ is clopen as in your example you can take $V=U$ $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 21:17
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    $\begingroup$ @alessandro-codenotti - That makes sense, though I would not call it a "proper" subset. (It may be that the text does not require that and was just assumed by the OP, forgetting about the possibility of clopen sets.) $\endgroup$
    – Apollo
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 21:24
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    $\begingroup$ Also I think this can be shown by an argument similar to the one used to show that a regular space has a local basis of closed sets at every point with a couple extra steps $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 21:32
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    $\begingroup$ Was there meant to be a link where you say "PDF available at link"? The DOI is <doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03004-2>, if that's what you wanted. (By the way, I notice you rightly edited out the \[ \], since the semantically correct way of doing it is not supported by MathJax; but, if you want a displayed environment, then the old-style $$ $$ works just fine.) $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 23:54

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