TITLE: Is there a Partition of $[0,1]$ into closed, countably infinite sets?
QUESTION [11 upvotes]: I'm wondering whether it is possible to Partition the closed interval $[0,1]$ into closed, countably infinite sets.
The only observations I could make were as follows:

When we remove the endpoints, we effectively end up with $\mathbb R$, and can consider the image of
$$\mathscr S :=\{r+\mathbb N\mid r\in [0,1)\}$$

Because every $S\in \mathscr S$ is bounded, it must contain at least one limit point. Because our partition itself must be uncountable, $\bigcup_{S\in \mathscr S} L(S)$ ist uncountable, and by second countability, has uncountably many limit points.
A natural example for a partition into countably infinite sets is $\{r+\mathbb Q\}$, but these elements are not closed – on the contrary, every sets closure is $\mathbb R$ already.


I'm not really sure where to go from there. My intuition says that this won't work, because it would get “too crowded” near the boundary points, but I'm not sure how to make this precise.

REPLY [10 votes]: It may be worth pointing out that a partition of $[0,1]$ into countably infinite closed sets can be constructed effectively, without using transfinite induction or the axiom of choice.
Let $C$ be the Cantor set. It is well known that we can define a bijection $h:(\frac13,\frac23)\to C.$
If $(a,b)$ is a connected component of $[0,1]\setminus C$ — in other words, $(a,b)$ is one of the "middle thirds" removed from $[0,1]$ in forming the Cantor set — define a bijection $h_{a,b}:(a,b)\to C\cap[2a-b,2b-a].$ No arbitrary choices are needed for this: $[2a-b,2b-a]$ the closed interval of which $(a,b)$ was the deleted middle third, so $C\cap[2a-b,b-2a]$ is similar to the Cantor set, and we can define $h_{a,b}$ as a composition of $h$ with the obvious affine maps: $(a,b)\to(\frac13,\frac23)\to C\to C\cap[2a-b,2b-a].$
Next, I define a map $f:[0,1]\to C.$
If $t\in C,$ let $f(t)=t.$
If $t\in[0,1]\setminus C,$ let $f(t)=h_{a,b}(t),$ where $(a,b)$ is the connected component of $[0,1]\setminus C$ containing $t.$
Finally, for each $x\in C,$ define $A_x=f^{-1}(x).$
Clearly, $\{A_x:x\in C\}$ is a partition of $[0,1],$ and each set $A_x$ is countable, since it contains exactly one point of $C$ and at most one point in each component interval $(a,b)$ of $[0,1]\setminus C.$ A little consideration will show that $A_x$ is also infinite and closed; in fact, it consists of the point $x$ and a sequence of points converging to $x.$