Lindelöf Theorem

Lindelöf and Countably Compact Topological Spaces

If Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle X} is a topological space and $A\subseteq X$, then $A$ is said to be compact in $X$ if every open cover of $A$ has a finite subcover.

Moreover, we said that $X$ is a compact topological space if every open cover of $X$ has a finite subcover.

We will now look at two similar definitions.

Definition: A topological space $X$ is said to be Lindelöf if every open cover of $X$ has a countable subcover. $X$ is said to be Countably Compact if every countable open cover of $X$ has a finite subcover.

It should be noted that the Lindelöf and countably compact property are weaker than the compactness property. If $X$ is a compact topological space then $X$ is also Lindelöf and countably compact.

For example, since $[0,1]$ is a compact topological space (with the subspace topology from the usual topology on $\mathbb {R}$), then by extension, $[0,1]$ is both Lindelöf and countably compact.

Of course, there exists topological spaces which are not compact but are still Lindelöf or countably compact.

For another example, consider the set of natural numbers $\mathbb {N}$ with the discrete topology, i.e., every subset of $\mathbb {N}$ is open. Then $\mathbb {N}$ is not compact, because of the following open cover of $\mathbb {N}$:

(1) ${\begin{aligned}\quad {\mathcal {F}}=\{\{n\}:n\in \mathbb {N} \}=\{\{1\},\{2\},...,\{n\},...\}\end{aligned}}$

Clearly there does not exist any subcollection ${\mathcal {F}}^{*}\subseteq {\mathcal {F}}$ that is finite and still covers Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} ! So Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} is not compact.

However, Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} is Lindelöf. To show this, let Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathcal F} be any open cover of Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} . Then we can choose a countable collection of sets from Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathcal F} which also cover Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} since each subset of Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathcal F} has cardinality greater than or equal to Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle 1} .

Unfortunately, Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} is not countably compact if we use the example open cover which showed that Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb{N}} was not compact.

So as we can see, the concept of compactness, Lindelöfness, and countable compactness are different properties.