In mathematics, a continuous function is a function such that a continuous variation of the argument induces a continuous variation of the value of the function. This means there are no abrupt changes in value, known as discontinuities. More precisely, a function is continuous if arbitrarily small changes in its value can be assured by restricting to sufficiently small changes of its argument. A discontinuous function is a function that is not continuous. Until the 19th century, mathematicians largely relied on intuitive notions of continuity and considered only continuous functions. The epsilon–delta definition of a limit was introduced to formalize the definition of continuity.
In topology and related branches of mathematics, a connected space is a topological space that cannot be represented as the union of two or more disjoint non-empty open subsets. Connectedness is one of the principal topological properties that are used to distinguish topological spaces.
In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of distance between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are the most general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry.
In mathematics, a topological space is, roughly speaking, a geometrical space in which closeness is defined but cannot necessarily be measured by a numeric distance. More specifically, a topological space is a set whose elements are called points, along with an additional structure called a topology, which can be defined as a set of neighbourhoods for each point that satisfy some axioms formalizing the concept of closeness. There are several equivalent definitions of a topology, the most commonly used of which is the definition through open sets, which is easier than the others to manipulate.
This is a glossary of some terms used in the branch of mathematics known as topology. Although there is no absolute distinction between different areas of topology, the focus here is on general topology. The following definitions are also fundamental to algebraic topology, differential topology and geometric topology.
In the mathematical field of topology, a uniform space is a topological space with additional structure that is used to define uniform properties, such as completeness, uniform continuity and uniform convergence. Uniform spaces generalize metric spaces and topological groups, but the concept is designed to formulate the weakest axioms needed for most proofs in analysis.
In mathematics, an open set is a generalization of an open interval in the real line.
In topology, the closure of a subset S of points in a topological space consists of all points in S together with all limit points of S. The closure of S may equivalently be defined as the union of S and its boundary, and also as the intersection of all closed sets containing S. Intuitively, the closure can be thought of as all the points that are either in S or "very near" S. A point which is in the closure of S is a point of closure of S. The notion of closure is in many ways dual to the notion of interior.
In mathematics, topological groups are the combination of groups and topological spaces, i.e. they are groups and topological spaces at the same time, such that the continuity condition for the group operations connects these two structures together and consequently they are not independent from each other.
In mathematics, a topological vector space is one of the basic structures investigated in functional analysis. A topological vector space is a vector space that is also a topological space with the property that the vector space operations are also continuous functions. Such a topology is called a vector topology and every topological vector space has a uniform topological structure, allowing a notion of uniform convergence and completeness. Some authors also require that the space is a Hausdorff space. One of the most widely studied categories of TVSs are locally convex topological vector spaces. This article focuses on TVSs that are not necessarily locally convex. Banach spaces, Hilbert spaces and Sobolev spaces are other well-known examples of TVSs.
In topology and related branches of mathematics, a T1 space is a topological space in which, for every pair of distinct points, each has a neighborhood not containing the other point. An R0 space is one in which this holds for every pair of topologically distinguishable points. The properties T1 and R0 are examples of separation axioms.
In topology and related branches of mathematics, separated sets are pairs of subsets of a given topological space that are related to each other in a certain way: roughly speaking, neither overlapping nor touching. The notion of when two sets are separated or not is important both to the notion of connected spaces as well as to the separation axioms for topological spaces.
In mathematics, a closure operator on a set S is a function :{\mathcal {P}}(S)\rightarrow {\mathcal {P}}(S)} from the power set of S to itself that satisfies the following conditions for all sets
In topology, a proximity space, also called a nearness space, is an axiomatization of the intuitive notion of "nearness" that hold set-to-set, as opposed to the better known point-to-set notion that characterize topological spaces.
In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, a set in a topological vector space is called bounded or von Neumann bounded, if every neighborhood of the zero vector can be inflated to include the set. A set that is not bounded is called unbounded.
In the mathematical field of topology, a hyperconnected space or irreducible space is a topological space X that cannot be written as the union of two proper closed sets. The name irreducible space is preferred in algebraic geometry.
In mathematics, Kuratowski convergence or Painlevé-Kuratowski convergence is a notion of convergence for subsets of a topological space. First introduced by Paul Painlevé in lectures on mathematical analysis in 1902, the concept was popularized in texts by Felix Hausdorff and Kazimierz Kuratowski. Intuitively, the Kuratowski limit of a sequence of sets is where the sets "accumulate".
In mathematics, near sets are either spatially close or descriptively close. Spatially close sets have nonempty intersection. In other words, spatially close sets are not disjoint sets, since they always have at least one element in common. Descriptively close sets contain elements that have matching descriptions. Such sets can be either disjoint or non-disjoint sets. Spatially near sets are also descriptively near sets.
In topology and related areas of mathematics, a subset A of a topological space X is said to be dense in X if every point of X either belongs to A or else is arbitrarily "close" to a member of A — for instance, the rational numbers are a dense subset of the real numbers because every real number either is a rational number or has a rational number arbitrarily close to it. Formally, is dense in if the smallest closed subset of containing is itself.
In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, a complete topological vector space is a topological vector space (TVS) with the property that whenever points get progressively closer to each other, then there exists some point towards which they all get closer. The notion of "points that get progressively closer" is made rigorous by Cauchy nets or Cauchy filters, which are generalizations of Cauchy sequences, while "point towards which they all get closer" means that this Cauchy net or filter converges to The notion of completeness for TVSs uses the theory of uniform spaces as a framework to generalize the notion of completeness for metric spaces. But unlike metric-completeness, TVS-completeness does not depend on any metric and is defined for all TVSs, including those that are not metrizable or Hausdorff.
