Gracious Living

Countability Axioms
December 31, 2010, 01:55
Filed under: Math, Topology | Tags: , , , ,

So far we’ve seen two basic families of properties of topological spaces.  The connectedness axioms tell us in what ways it is possible to break our space apart into pieces.  The compactness axioms tell us how bounded the space is.  What we’re going to look at today is a set of axioms that deal with cardinality.  It should be mentioned that topology, for the most part, doesn’t really care about large cardinals — at most, we’re dealing with $\aleph_1$, the cardinality of our favorite counterexample $\omega_1$, and $c$, the cardinality of the reals.  These are equal if we accept the continuum hypothesis, and in either case we often talk about them in terms of countable subsets — sequences and the like.  The reason that countability is so important is that the properties we’re about to study are typical of metric spaces, and metrizability is a central question of point-set topology.

Limit Point and Sequential Compactness
December 30, 2010, 02:51
Filed under: Math, Topology | Tags: , , ,

Back to topology.  The interesting thing about compactness, as I see it, is that its definition isn’t very intuitive.  We want to talk about what are basically “closed and bounded” sets without really using closedness, which doesn’t behave well with subspaces, or boundedness, which doesn’t behave well with anything.  At the time this idea came about in the early part of this century, the mathematicians ssewho invented it (Borel, Weierstrass, and Bolzano, mainly, I think) messed around with a couple other definitions but they turned out to rely on intuition from Euclidean space, and so not be nearly as useful.  In this post, we’ll study those other definitions.

I debated with myself for a long time about what to do first: this, the separation axioms (which measure how good the topology is at distinguishing disjoint sets), or the countability axioms (which measure, well, how countable the topology is).  In a sense, each one depends on the other two for examples and theorems, and in this case, though it’s easy to show that all the properties I’m listing are different, we’ll need to refer to the other properties to discover when they are the same.  So I expect this post to be brief; after we have all the other properties defined, it’ll be easier to talk about what implies what.

Local Connectedness and Some Weird Counterexamples
November 10, 2010, 14:25
Filed under: Math, Topology | Tags: , , , , ,

Last time we talked about connectedness and path-connectedness and showed that though all path-connected spaces are also connected, connected spaces are not in general path-connected. There is a partial remedy to this problem, found in the local versions of the connectedness properties.  Recall that a local property says something about neighborhoods of each point, rather than the space itself or its open sets.  Below the fold, I talk about local connectedness and local path-connectedness, and bring up a couple examples and counterexamples, including one of my favorites, the Conway base-13 function.