examples of compact spaces
Here are some examples of compact spaces (http://planetmath.org/Compact):
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The unit interval [0,1] is compact. This follows from the Heine-Borel Theorem. Proving that theorem is about as hard as proving directly that [0,1] is compact. The half-open interval (0,1] is not compact: the open cover for does not have a finite subcover.
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Again from the Heine-Borel Theorem, we see that the closed unit ball
of any finite-dimensional normed vector space
is compact. This is not true for infinite dimensions
; in fact, a normed vector space is finite-dimensional if and only if its closed unit ball is compact.
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Any finite topological space is compact.
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Consider the set of all infinite sequences with entries in . We can turn it into a metric space by defining , where is the smallest index such that (if there is no such index, then the two sequences are the same, and we define their distance to be zero). Then is a compact space, a consequence of Tychonoff
’s theorem. In fact, is homeomorphic
to the Cantor set (which is compact by Heine-Borel). This construction can be performed for any finite set, not just {0,1}.
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Consider the set of all functions and defined a topology
on so that a sequence in converges towards if and only if converges towards for all .(There is only one such topology; it is called the topology of pointwise convergence). Then is a compact topological space, again a consequence of Tychonoff’s theorem.
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Take any set , and define the cofinite topology
on by declaring a subset of to be open if and only if it is empty or its complement is finite. Then is a compact topological space.
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The prime spectrum of any commutative ring with the Zariski topology
is a compact space important in algebraic geometry
. These prime spectra are almost never Hausdorff spaces.
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If is a Hilbert space
and is a continuous linear operator, then the spectrum of is a compact subset of . If is infinite-dimensional, then any compact subset of arises in this manner from some continuous linear operator on .
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If is a complex C*-algebra
which is commutative
and contains a one, then the set of all non-zero algebra homomorphisms carries a natural topology (the weak-* topology) which turns it into a compact Hausdorff space. is isomorphic
to the C*-algebra of continuous complex-valued functions on with the supremum norm.
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Any profinite group is compact Hausdorff: finite discrete spaces are compact Hausdorff, therefore their product
is compact Hausdorff, and a profinite group is a closed subset of such a product.
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Any locally compact Hausdorff space
can be turned into a compact space by adding a single point to it (Alexandroff one-point compactification (http://planetmath.org/AlexandrovOnePointCompactification)). The one-point compactification of is homeomorphic to the circle ; the one-point compactification of is homeomorphic to the sphere . Using the one-point compactification, one can also easily construct compact spaces which are not Hausdorff, by starting with a non-Hausdorff space.
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Other non-Hausdorff compact spaces are given by the left order topology (or right order topology) on bounded
totally ordered sets
.