# Topological proof that a Vitali set is not Borel

This question is purely out of curiosity, and well outside my field — apologies if there is a trivial answer. Recall that a Vitali set is a subset $$V$$ of $$[0,1]$$ such that the restriction to $$V$$ of the quotient map $$\mathbb{R}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Q}$$ is bijective. It follows easily from the definition that $$V$$ is not Lebesgue measurable. Now suppose you don't know the Lebesgue measure (which, after all, is not that easy to construct). Is there a topological proof that $$V$$ is not a Borel subset of $$\mathbb{R}$$?

• The family of sets satisfying the property of Baire is a sigma-algebra, in particular all Borel sets have this property. On the other hand, Vitali set does not have this property. This is a nice instance of Baire property being a convenient substitute of Lebesgue measurability in topological contexts. – Wojowu May 25 at 9:33
• Very good, thanks! If you feel like writing this as an answer I'll accept it. – abx May 25 at 9:38
• You may be interested in Oxtoby's book Measure and Category that goes through several parallel examples of theorems about measure and Baire category. Wojowu's answer explains the "category analogue" of Vitali's theorem. – Robert Furber May 25 at 23:40

Sometimes a convenient substitute for Lebesgue measurability is the property of Baire. Just like Lebesgue measurability, the class of sets with this property is a $$\sigma$$-algebra containing the open subsets - indeed, open sets clearly have property of Baire, this class is closed under countable unions since meager sets are closed under countable unions, and it's closed under complements essentially since the boundary of an open set is nowhere dense.
It of course follows that every Borel set has the property of Baire. It remains to show the Vitali set doesn't have a property of Baire. Indeed, assume it was, then either $$V$$ is meager, or it is comeager in some open interval. The former cannot hold, since $$[0,1]$$ is contained in countable union of translates of $$V$$, so would be meager itself. In the other hand, if it were comeager in some open interval $$I$$, then for any rational $$q$$ the intersection $$I\cap(V+q)$$, since it's contained in $$I\setminus V$$, is meager, from which we would conclude $$V$$ is meager.
• Just for completeness: a subset $Y$ of a topological space $X$ has the Baire property, or is almost open in $X$ if it differs from an open subset by a meager subset, i.e., can be written as $U\triangle M$ with $U$ open and $M$ meager. And meager means, contained in a countable union of closed subsets with empty interior. – YCor May 25 at 10:48
• Also I guess that "$V$ is meager in some open interval" should be understood as "there exists a nonempty open interval $I$ such that $V\cap I$ is comeager in $I$". (It took me a while to unravel so I'm adding this as a comment.) – YCor May 25 at 10:53
• (yes, and sorry for the typo you corrected: I should have quoted "$V$ is co-meager in some open interval) – YCor May 25 at 11:03