Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-introduction-to-schemes-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2017/2/b/i/solution

Put , where the closure is taken in the underlying topological space of . It is nonempty because it contains .
Suppose for two closed subsets of in the subspace topology. Since is a closed subset of , both and are also closed subsets of . The point lies in one of them, say . By the defining minimality of the closure, every closed subset of containing contains . Hence , so .
Thus cannot be expressed as the union of two proper closed subsets, proving that is an irreducible closed subset. This proves closure of a point is irreducible in every topological space; the scheme assumption is unnecessary. Equivalently, is a generic point of its own closure.

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