Poincare Project: Topological Properties Revisited
Part of the Poincare Project.
Recall that a topological property is one based only on the open sets of a topology and not any other structure. For this reason a topological property is preserved under a homeomorphism. If one topological space has a topological property and another doesn't have that property then the two spaces can't be homeomorphic.
So far we've talked about the following topological properties:
Compactness is enough to topologically distinguish a circle from an open interval. A circle is compact whereas an open interval is not.
Connectedness is enough to topologically distinguish the real line R from the plane R^2 because if you take away a point from R and from R^2 then R is disconnected but R^2 is still connected.
We don't yet have a topological property that can distinguish a sphere from torus. We shortly will and it will be at the heart of the Poincare Conjecture.
UPDATE: next post
Comments (1)
Last Modified: April 27, 2005
Author: James Tauber
bill silveria on Dec. 26, 2007:
Rigorously, there are at least three primitive notions that can be used to define a topological space:
1. The primitive notion of the "open set"
2. The primitive notion of the "neighborhood of a point"
3. The primitive notion of the "closure of a set" (Kuratowski Closure Axioms).
Topological properties can be based on any of the above three (related) primitives.