Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 ib Paper 4 13E b ii Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
The decisive use of hypothesis (ii) is a neighbourhood construction: for any open containing a fibre , a closed map givesIndeed, is closed set, its image is closed set, and cannot be in that image. A point of cannot lie outside . Applying this to the finite union covering each compact fibre supplies a whole neighbourhood of that fibre's value using the same finitely many cover elements. Compactness of selects finitely many such neighbourhoods and hence a finite subcover of , proving the desired compact-preimage theorem for closed maps.
The closed map assumption cannot simply be omitted. Give the discrete topology and the usual subspace topology from . The bijection , is continuous, and all its fibres are compact singletons. But is compact whereas is an infinite discrete space, which is not compact. The map is not closed set, since the closed subset has image , missing its limit point .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 ib Paper 4 13E b i Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
The labels (i) and (ii) in the original PDF are hypotheses of one theorem, not separate requests. Here is the finite-cover step furnished by the compact fibres. Start with any open cover of , with the open in (a relative cover can be lifted to one of this form). For each , compactness gives a finite set withAn empty fibre needs no cover elements: take and .
The complementary set is closed set. By the closed map hypothesis, its image is closed set, sois open, contains , and satisfies . These open sets cover the compact set . Select finitely many, . The finitely many original cover elements with indices in then cover . ThereforeThis proves the unheaded conclusion in the PDF as well as explaining the role of hypothesis (i). No Hausdorff assumption is needed for this compact-preimage theorem for closed maps.