Closure of unions is union of closures via limit point definition

general-topologyreal-analysis

I am trying to understand this fact via definition of limit points: limit point $x$ of set $X$ is a point, every epsilon-neighborhood $V_{\epsilon}(x)$ of which intersects with $X$ in point other than $x$.

I have the following idea:
Limit point $x \in (X \cup Y)'$ means that $V_{\epsilon}(x) \cap (X \cup Y) \ne \emptyset$, which means that $(V_{\epsilon}(x) \cap X) \cup (V_{\epsilon}(x) \cap Y) \ne \emptyset$. Does that mean that $x \in (X)' \lor x \in (Y)'$ and would that mean that all limit points in $(X \cup Y)'$ are limit points in $(X)' \cup (Y)'$? Could this intuition be expanded into solid proof?

Best Answer

As noted above, the argument you have in mind works in the case of the union of two sets. Consequently, you can infer that this property holds for finite unions. However, it does not hold in the case of infinite unions. For example, in the standard topology on $\mathbb{R}$, $\bigcup_{n \in \mathbb{N}} [1/n, 1] = (0, 1]$ while the closure of this union is $[0, 1]$.

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