Universitext

Editorial Board
(North America):
S. Axler
K.A. Ribet
Volker Runde

A Taste of Topology

With 17 Figures
Volker Runde
Department of Mathematical
and Statistical Sciences
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2G1
[email protected]

Editorial Board
(North America):
S. Axler K.A. Ribet
Mathematics Department Mathematics Department
San Francisco State University University of California at Berkeley
San Francisco, CA 94132 Berkeley, CA 94720-3840
USA USA
[email protected] [email protected]

Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 54-01, 55-01

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005924410

ISBN-10: 0-387-25790-X Printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN-13: 978-0387-25790-7

© 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the
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Volker Runde

A Taste of Topology
March 14, 2005

Springer
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Preface

If mathematics is a language, then taking a topology course at the undergradu-

ate level is cramming vocabulary and memorizing irregular verbs: a necessary,
but not always exciting exercise one has to go through before one can read
great works of literature in the original language, whose beauty eventually—in
retrospect—compensates for all the drudgery.
Set-theoretic topology leaves its mark on mathematics not so much
through powerful theorems (even though there are some), but rather by pro-
viding a unified framework for many phenomena in a wide range of mathe-
matical disciplines. An introductory course in topology is necessarily concept
heavy; the nature of the subject demands it. If the instructor wants to flesh
out the concepts with examples, one problem arises immediately in an un-
dergraduate course: the students don’t yet have a mathematical background
broad enough that would enable them to understand “natural” examples, such
as those from analysis or geometry. Most examples in such a course therefore
tend to be of the concocted kind: constructions, sometimes rather intricate,
that serve no purpose other than to show that property XY is stronger than
property YX whereas the converse is false. There is the very real danger that
students come out of a topology course believing that freely juggling with defi-
nitions and contrived examples is what mathematics—or at least topology—is
all about.
The present book grew out of lecture notes for Math 447 (Elementary
Topology) at the University of Alberta, a fourth-year undergraduate course I
taught in the winter term 2004. I had originally planned to use [Simmons 63]
as a text, mainly because it was the book from which I learned the material.
Since there were some topics I wanted to cover, but that were not treated
in [Simmons 63], I started typing my own notes and making them available
on the Web, and in the end I wound up writing my own book. My audience
included second-year undergraduates as well as graduate students, so their
mathematical background was inevitably very varied. This fact has greatly
influenced the exposition, in particular the selection of examples. I have made
an effort to present examples that are, firstly, not self-serving and, secondly,
vi Preface

accessible for students who have a background in calculus and elementary

algebra, but not necessarily in real or complex analysis.
It is clear that an introductory topology text only allows for a limited
degree of novelty. Most topics covered in this book can be found in any other
book on the subject. I have thus tried my best to make the presentation as
fresh and accessible as possible, but whether I have succeeded depends very
much on my readers’ tastes. Besides, in a few points, this books treats its
material differently than—to my knowledge, at least—any other text on the
subject.
• Baire’s theorem is derived from Bourbaki’s Mittag-Leffler theorem;
• Nets are extensively used, and, in particular, we give a fairly intu-
itive proof—using nets—of Tychonoff’s theorem due to Paul R. Chernoff
[Chernoff 92];
• The complex Stone–Weierstraß theorem is obtained via Silvio Machado’s
short and elegant approach [Machado 77].
With a given syllabus and a limited amount of classroom time, every in-
structor in every course has to make choices on what to cover and what to
omit. These choices will invariably reflect his or her own tastes and biases, in
particular, when it comes to omissions. The topics most ostensibly omitted
from this book are: filters and uniform spaces. I simply find nets, with all the
parallels between them and sequences, far more intuitive than filters when
it comes to discussing convergence (others may disagree). Treating uniform
spaces in an introductory course is a problem, in my opinion, due to the lack of
elementary, yet natural, examples that aren’t metric spaces in the first place.
Any book, even if there is only one author named on the cover, is to
some extent an accomplishment of several people. This one is no exception,
and I would like to thank Eva Maria Krause for her thorough and insightful
proofreading of the entire manuscript. Of course, without my students—their
feedback and enthusiasm—this book would not have been written. I hope that
taking the course was as much fun for them as teaching it was for me, and that
they had A Taste of Topology that will make their appetite for mathematics
grow in the years to come.

Volker Runde
Edmonton, March 14, 2005
Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

List of Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1 Set Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1 Sets and Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 Cardinals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3 Cartesian Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

2 Metric Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.1 Definitions and Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2 Open and Closed Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3 Convergence and Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.4 Completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.5 Compactness for Metric Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

3 Set-Theoretic Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1 Topological Spaces—Definitions and Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2 Continuity and Convergence of Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.3 Compactness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.4 Connectedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.5 Separation Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

4 Systems of Continuous Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

4.1 Urysohn’s Lemma and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.2 The Stone–Čech Compactification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
viii Contents

4.3 The Stone–Weierstraß Theorems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

5 Basic Algebraic Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

5.1 Homotopy and the Fundamental Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
5.2 Covering Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

A The Classical Mittag-Leffler Theorem Derived from

Bourbaki’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

B Failure of the Heine–Borel Theorem in Infinite-

Dimensional Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

C The Arzelà–Ascoli Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
List of Symbols

(0), 68 Bx , 65

·
, 24

·
1 , 24 c, 16

·
∞ , 24
T C, 5
S{S : S ∈ S}, 8 C∞ , 86
{S : S ∈ S}, 8 C([0, 1]), 24
∈, 5 C(X, Y ), 42
∞, 34 Cb (X, Y ), 42
∈,
/ 5 C0 (X, F), 126
∂S,
Q 33 cl, 67
Q{S : S ∈ S}, 18
i∈I Si , 18 d, 24
∼, 134 diam, 44
, 136 dim, 40
⊂, 6 dist, 34

, 6 distF , 122
∅, 5
2κ , 16 φα , 144
f |A , 10
ℵ0 , 16
f (A), 10
(a, b), 6
f −1 (B), 10
[a, b], 6
f ◦ g, 11
(a, b], 6
[a, b), 6 F, 24
A ∩ B, 8 f −1 , 12
A ∪ B, 8 f∗ , 142
A \ B, 8 f : S → T , 10
Ar,R [x0 ], 135 F (S, Y ), 65

βX, 118 [γ], 141

Bn , 143 γ1  γ2 , 98
Br (x0 ), 28 γ −1 , 98
Br [x0 ], 30
B(S, Y ), 24 H(Ω), 159
x List of Symbols

idS , 10 |S| ≤ |T |, 14
|S| < |T |, 14
limα xα , 74 Spec(R), 63
limn→∞ xn , 35 Sn−1 , 90
L(U), 58 S2, 9
S × T, 9
µ, 95 S I , 18
S n , 17
N, 5
N0 , 5 T , 61
Nx , 29 TC , 65
Nf,C, , 65 T∞ , 86
Nx , 64
V (I), 63
π, 8
π1 (X, x0 ), 138 χn , 95
πn (X, x0 ), 155 (xα )α , 74
p, 63 (xα )α∈A , 74
P(S), 7 xα → x, 74
P (X, x0 ), 138 (X, d), 24
P (X; x0 , x1 ), 138 X∞ , 86
(xn )∞
n=1 , 10
Q, 5 (xn )∞
n=m , 10
xn → x, 35
R, 5 x  y, 18
R(f ; P, ξ), 74 ““ T ), ”62 ”
(X,
X̃, T̃ , p , 149
S, 30
(x, y), 9
|S| = |T |, 13
|S| ≥ |T |, 14 Yx , 94
|S| > |T |, 14
◦
S , 34 Z, 5