Past exam of the introduction to schemes course of the University of Oxford 2017 2 b i Solution 2026-10-25
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.