Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2022 ii Paper 3 21G a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Let be disjoint closed subsets of the metric space ; the cases where one is empty are immediate. The distance functionsare continuous, because each is 1-Lipschitz. Their sum is strictly positive: if both distances vanished, closedness would put in . Thereforeis continuous, equals zero on , and equals one on . The setsare disjoint open neighbourhoods of and . Thus every metric space is a normal topological space; this is the normality of every metric space.
The intended hypothesis is that is not connected. The original PDF has the same grammatical ambiguity as the transcription. If only were assumed not connected, the assertion would fail for the discrete space with its usual metric and the closed subset : two disjoint sets cannot both meet that singleton.
Under the intended reading, choose a separation of a topological space . Both and are nonempty and closed in , because each is the complement of the other relatively open part. Since is closed in , both are closed in .
For a nonempty subset of the metric space , the distance to a set satisfiesIndeed, the triangle inequality gives , and swapping proves the bound. Thus the two distance to a set functions below are continuous. SetThese are disjoint open sets. For , we have and , since is closed and . Hence . Similarly . Therefore and both and meet , as required. The construction is a concrete instance of the normality of every metric space.