Covering analytic sets by families of closed set
AbstractWe prove that for every familyIof closed subsets of a Polish space eachset can be covered by countably many members ofIor else contains a nonemptyset which cannot be covered by countably many members ofI. We prove an analogous result forκ-Souslin sets and show that ifA#exists for anyA⊂ωω, then the above result is true forsets. A theorem of Martin is included stating that this result is also true for weakly homogeneously Souslin sets. As an application of our results we derive from them a general form of Hurewicz's theorem due to Kechris. Louveau, and Woodin and a theorem of Feng on the open covering axiom. Also some well-known theorems on finding “big” closed sets insideof“big”andare consequences of our results.