Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/ib/paper-3/3e/solution

The convention in this question counts a point whenever every open neighbourhood meets , without excluding the point itself. These are adherent points, whose set is the closure ; they differ from limit points under the convention that requires a different point of in each neighbourhood.
If is a closed set and , the open set is a neighbourhood of disjoint from . Thus every adherent point lies in . Conversely, if every adherent point lies in , each has an open neighbourhood disjoint from . Their union is , which is open. Hence is closed exactly when it contains all the points specified in the question.
The interior of a set and closure are
The neighbourhood description of the closure follows because failure to be adherent is equivalent to lying in an open set disjoint from .
For closure of a connected set, suppose were a separation into two nonempty relatively open sets. Their intersections with the connected subset would separate unless one intersection were empty. Say . Choose and an open set with and . Since , the set meets , contradicting . Thus the closure of a connected set is connected. The empty-set case holds directly.

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