Paper 4, Section II, G

Metric and Topological Spaces
Part IB, 2013

Let XX be a topological space. A connected component of XX means an equivalence class with respect to the equivalence relation on XX defined as:

xyx,y belong to some connected subspace of X.x \sim y \Longleftrightarrow x, y \text { belong to some connected subspace of } X .

(i) Show that every connected component is a connected and closed subset of XX.

(ii) If X,YX, Y are topological spaces and X×YX \times Y is the product space, show that every connected component of X×YX \times Y is a direct product of connected components of XX and YY.