Connectedness is not weakly hereditary
This article gives the statement, and possibly proof, of a topological space property (i.e., connected space) not satisfying a topological space metaproperty (i.e., weakly hereditary property of topological spaces).
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Statement
It is possible to have a nonempty topological space and a nonempty closed subset of such that:
- is a connected space
- is not a connected space under the subspace topology from .
Related facts
- Connected is not hereditary includes more motivating discussion, the examples here are a subset of the examples on that page.
Proof
Examples using finite topological spaces
For a counterexample, must have at least two points, because the unique one-point space is connected. Therefore, must have at least three points. We discuss two (related) examples of spaces of size three.
Space with one open point and two closed points
Take:
with the topology defined as follows: the open subsets are:
Or equivalently, the closed subsets are:
Clearly, is connected: the only nonempty closed subset containing is all of , and therefore cannot be expressed as a union of two disjoint nonempty open subsets. In fact, framed more strongly, is an irreducible space.
Consider to be the subset of with the subspace topology. has a discrete topology, and in particular, is a union of disjoint closed subsets and . Therefore, it is not connected.
Basically, the point serves the role of connecting the space, and removing it disconnects the space.