Harman Patil (Editor)

Non Hausdorff manifold

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In geometry and topology, it is a usual axiom of a manifold to be a Hausdorff space, that is "manifold" means "second countable Hausdorff manifold".

Contents

In general topology, this axiom is relaxed, and one studies non-Hausdorff manifolds: spaces locally homeomorphic to Euclidean space, but not necessarily Hausdorff.

Line with two origins

The most familiar non-Hausdorff manifold is the line with two origins, or bug-eyed line.

This is the quotient space of two copies of the real line

R × {a} and R × {b}

with the equivalence relation

( x , a ) ( x , b )  if  x 0.

This space has a single point for each nonzero real number r and two points 0a and 0b. In this space all neighbourhoods of 0a intersect all neighbourhoods of 0b, so it is non-Hausdorff.

Further, the line with two origins does not have the homotopy type of a CW-complex, or of any Hausdorff space.

Branching line

Similar to the line with two origins is the branching line.

This is the quotient space of two copies of the real line

R × {a} and R × {b}

with the equivalence relation

( x , a ) ( x , b )  if  x < 0.

This space has a single point for each negative real number r and two points x a , x b for every non-negative number: it has a "fork" at zero.

Etale space

The etale space of a sheaf, such as the sheaf of continuous real functions over a manifold, is a manifold that is often non-Hausdorff. (The etale space is Hausdorff if it is a sheaf of functions with some sort of analytic continuation property.)

References

Non-Hausdorff manifold Wikipedia