A mapping from a metric space
to itself is called a contraction if there exists an
such that for every
we have
. The Banach fixed point theorem (aka the contraction theorem) says that every contraction on a non-empty complete metric space has exactly one fixed point.
Proof: Suppose is a complete metric space and that
is a contraction. Let
be any point. Define
,
,
and so forth. If we write
in terms of
and
, we see that
. Now consider
where we assume, without loss of generality, that
. By the triangle inequality we have
We can obviously make this value as small as we’d like by picking a large enough , so the sequence
is Cauchy and must converge. Call the limit of this sequence
. Now consider the distance between
and
.
By picking a large enough , we can make this as small as we’d like as well, so we have
so
has a fixed point. For the uniqueness of
, suppose
is also a fixed point.
The only way this holds is if , so
. Note that the
we constructed didn’t depend on on our initial value of
, so every sequence we construct by picking a point in
and iterating
will result in the same limit.