How to Show [0,1]^? is Not Locally Compact in Uniform Topology

compactnessgeneral-topology

On page 186 of Munkres' Topology

Show that $[0,1]^{\omega}$ is not locally compact in the uniform topology?

Uniform topology is defined as topology induced by uniform metric $p$ which is stated as follows.

For any two points $a$, $b$ in $\mathbb{R}$, $$\bar{d}(a,b) = \text{min}\{|a-b|,1\}$$
For any two points $x$, $y$ in $[0,1]^{\omega}$ $$x = \{x_i:i<\omega\}$$ $$y=\{y_j:j<\omega\}$$ $$p(x,y) = \text{sup}\{\bar{d}(x_i,y_i):i<\omega\}$$

Is there some method to gain intuition on infinite product of topological space in various topologies? Could we visualize it as the finite product case?

Best Answer

Use the equivalent definition of local compactness: if $x \in U \subset C$, $U$ open, $C$ compact, then there must be a ball $B_{\epsilon}(x)$ whose closure $\bar{B}$ is contained in $U$. Apply this to $x = 0$. Then the closure of such a ball is compact as it is a closed subset of a compact set in a metric space. But it is not: look at the set $A = \{ x_i = (0, \dots, 0, \epsilon, 0, \dots ), i \in \mathbb{N} \} \subset \bar{B}$, with the $\epsilon$ in position $i$. It has no limit point $x$ in $A$ ($x$ cannot contain a coordinate in $(0, \epsilon)$ or a small enough ball around $x$ will not contain any $y \in A$; and in the other case, it is at distance $0$ or $\epsilon$ from any point in $A$ - think about that!). So $A$ is not limit-point compact, which in metric spaces is equivalent to being compact. Contradiction. 

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