Hausdorff spaces are named after Felix Hausdorff, who helped originate general topology. In fact, Hausdorff's original definition of topological space required all topological spaces to be Hausdorff (a requirement that is not made today).
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2 Examples and nonexamples 3 Properties 4 Variations 5 Joke |
Suppose that X is a topological space.
X is a Hausdorff space, or T2 space, or separated space, iff, given any distinct points x and y, there are a neighbourhood U of x and a neighbourhood V of y that are disjoint.
In fancier terms, this condition says that x and y can be separated by neighbourhoods.
X is a preregular space, or R1 space, iff, given any topologically distinguishable points x and y, x and y can be separated by neighbourhoods.
Limitss of sequences, netss, and filterss (when they exist) are unique in Hausdorff spaces.
In fact, a topological space is Hausdorff if and only if every net (or filter) has at most one limit.
Similarly, a space is preregular iff all of the limits of a given net (or filter) are topologically indistinguishable.
A topological space X is Hausdorff if and only if the diagonal {(x,x) : x in X} is a closed set in X × X, the Cartesian product of X with itself.
A topological space is Hausdorff if and only if it is both preregular and T0.
Conversely, a topological space is preregular if and only if its Kolmogorov quotient is Hausdorff.
Almost all spaces encountered in analysis are Hausdorff; most importantly, the real numbers are a Hausdorff space.
More generally, all metric spaces are Hausdorff.
In fact, many spaces of use in analysis, such as topological groups and topological manifolds, have the Hausdorff condition explicitly stated in their definitions.
Pseudometric spaces typically are not Hausdorff, but they are preregular, and their use in analysis is usually only in the construction of Hausdorff gauge spaces.
Indeed, when analysts run across a non-Hausdorff space, it is still probably at least preregular, and then they simply replace it with its Kolmogorov quotient, which is Hausdorff.
In contrast, non-preregular spaces are encountered much more frequently in abstract algebra and algebraic geometry, in particular as the Zariski topology on an algebraic variety or the spectrum of a ring.
They also arise in the model theory of intuitionistic logic: every complete Heyting algebra is the algebra of open sets of some topological space, but this space need not be preregular, much less Hausdorff.
Hausdorff spaces are T1, meaning that all singletonss are closed.
Similarly, preregular spaces are R0.
Subspacess and products of Hausdorff spaces are Hausdorff, but quotient spaces of Hausdorff spaces need not be Hausdorff.
In fact, a quotient space of a Hausdorff space X is itself Hausdorff if and only if the kernel of the quotient map is closed as a subset of the Cartesian product X × X.
Compact preregular spaces are normal, meaning that they satisfy Urysohn's lemma and the Tietze extension theorem and have partitions of unity subordinate to locally finite open covers.
All regular spaces are preregular, as are all Hausdorff spaces. There are many results for topological spaces that hold for both regular and Hausdorff spaces.
Most of the time, these results hold for all preregular spaces; they were listed for regular and Hausdorff spaces separately because the idea of preregular spaces came later.
On the other hand, those results that are truly about regularity generally don't also apply to nonregular Hausdorff spaces.
There are many situations where another condition of topological spaces (such as paracompactness or local compactness) will imply regularity if preregularity is satisfied.
Such conditions often come in two versions: a regular version and a Hausdorff version.
Although Hausdorff spaces aren't generally regular, a Hausdorff space that is also (say) locally compact will be regular, because any Hausdorff space is preregular.
Thus from a certain point of view, it is really preregularity, rather than regularity, that matters in these situations.
However, definitions are usually still phrased in terms of regularity, since this condition is more well known than preregularity.
See History of the separation axioms for more on this issue.
The terms "Hausdorff", "separated", and "preregular" can also be applied to such variations of topological spaces as uniform spaces, Cauchy spaces, and convergence spaces.
The characteristic that unites the concept in all of these examples is that limits of nets and filters (when they exist) are unique (for separated spaces) or unique up to topological indistinguishability (for preregular spaces).
As it turns out, uniform spaces, and more generally Cauchy spaces, are always preregular, so the Hausdorff condition in these cases reduces to the T0 condition.
These are also the spaces in which completeness makes sense, and Hausdorffness is a natural companion to completeness in these cases.
Specifically, a space is complete iff every Cauchy net has at least one limit, while a space is Hausdorff iff every Cauchy net has at most one limit (since only Cauchy nets can have limits in the first place).Definitions
Alternative characterisations
Examples and nonexamples
Properties
Preregularity versus regularity
Variations