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Abstract

We give an abstract version of Sierpiński's theorem which says that the closure in the uniform convergence topology of the algebra spanned by the sums of lower and upper semicontinuous functions is the class of all Baire 1 functions. Later we show that a natural generalization of Sierpiński's result for the uniform closure of the space of all sums of A and CA functions is not true. Namely we show that the uniform closure of the space of all sums of A and CA functions is a proper subclass of the space of all functions measurable with respect to the least class containing intersections of analytic and coanalytic sets and which is closed under countable unions (A and CA functions are analogues of lower and upper semicontinuous functions, respectively, when measurability with respect to open sets is replaced by that with respect to analytic sets).