Paper 1, Section II, E

Metric and Topological Spaces
Part IB, 2017

Consider R\mathbb{R} and R2\mathbb{R}^{2} with their usual Euclidean topologies.

(a) Show that a non-empty subset of R\mathbb{R} is connected if and only if it is an interval. Find a compact subset KRK \subset \mathbb{R} for which R\K\mathbb{R} \backslash K has infinitely many connected components.

(b) Let TT be a countable subset of R2\mathbb{R}^{2}. Show that R2\T\mathbb{R}^{2} \backslash T is path-connected. Deduce that R2\mathbb{R}^{2} is not homeomorphic to R\mathbb{R}.