[Math] A Compact, Hausdorff topological space has finitely many components

general-topology

I'm not sure if this is a true statement or not, but due to the compactness, it seems like it should be. My attempt at a proof involves supposing it has infinitely many components, and then taking a sequence such that each element in the sequence is in a unique component. Since compactness implies limit-pint compactness, we know this infinite subset of has a limit point. From here, it seems like this limit point should provide a contradiction to the construction, but I haven't been able to show any contradiction yet…

Essentially what I want to do is show that a component is closed and open, and if there are only finitely many, we get this for free.

Note that this is part of a larger problem, this is just what the guts of my proof comes down to, so if it isn't true, the direction of my proof is entirely wrong…

Thanks in advance!!

Best Answer

For a simpler example, note that $\{0,1,\frac{1}{2},\frac{1}{3},\frac{1}{4}\ldots\}$ (with its natural topology as a subspace of $\Bbb{R}$ is compact, Hausdorff, and has $\aleph_0$ components.

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