Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-analytic-topology-and-axiomatic-set-theory-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2009/a/3/iv/solution
Past exam of the analytic topology and axiomatic set theory course of the University of Oxford 2009 A 3 iv Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
Write , making explicit that these are subsets of . If and is an open neighbourhood of , then is compact and hence closed in . The open set still contains and meets the dense image of . Such an intersection point belongs to , so for every .
Conversely, if choose an integer . Since is an embedding, there is an open neighbourhood of in whose intersection with is . It misses , so . HenceFor the two ends of a real-line compactification, let and . Each is nonempty compact and connected, being the closure of a connected image. The two nested families therefore have nonempty connected intersections and . Since closure commutes with finite unions, . MoreoverFor if a point fails both intersections, it fails one positive member and one negative member, hence both members at the larger index by nesting.
If the remainder were a finite three-point set, its Hausdorff subspace topology would be discrete. Each nonempty connected subset would then be a singleton, so their union would have at most two points. This contradiction proves there is no three-point Hausdorff compactification of the real line. The argument does not assert that every possible remainder is finite.
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