English

Countable ordinal spaces and compact countable subsets of a metric space

General Topology 2019-11-12 v2

Abstract

We show in detail that every compact countable subset of a metric space is homeomorphic to a countable ordinal number, which extends a result given by Mazurkiewicz and Sierpinski for finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. In order to achieve this goal, we use Transfinite Induction to construct a specific homeomorphism. In addition, we prove that for all metric space (E,d)(E,d), the cardinality of the set of all the equivalence classes KE\mathscr{K}_E, up to homeomorphisms, of compact countable subsets of EE is less than or equal to 1\aleph_1, i.e. KE1|\mathscr{K}_E| \le \aleph_1. We also show that for all cardinal number κ\kappa smaller than or equal to 1\aleph_1, there exists a metric space (Eκ,dκ)(E_{\kappa}, d_{\kappa}) such that KEκ=κ|\mathscr{K}_{E_{\kappa}}|= \kappa.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.00400,
  title  = {Countable ordinal spaces and compact countable subsets of a metric space},
  author = {Borys Álvarez-Samaniego and Andrés Merino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.00400},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages