Copyright © 2011 Agata Caserta. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a decomposition of two topologies which characterize the upper and lower semicontinuity of the limit function to visualize their hidden and opposite roles with respect to the upper and lower semicontinuity and consequently the continuity of the limit. We show that (from the statistical point of view) there is an asymmetric role of the upper and lower decomposition of the pointwise convergence with respect to the upper and lower decomposition of the sticking convergence and the semicontinuity of the limit. This role is completely hidden if we use the whole pointwise convergence. Moreover, thanks to this mirror effect played by these decompositions, the statistical pointwise convergence of a sequence of continuous functions to a continuous function in one of the two symmetric topologies, which are the decomposition of the sticking topology, automatically ensures the convergence in the whole sticking topology.