Let $X$ be a topological space such that image of any continuous function $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is compact,connected,dense, can we say that $X$ is compact and connected,dense too?
Is my question makes any sense?I was just trying to think converses of our known statements like : continuous map sends compact to compact and connected to connected, dense to dense!
Thank you!
[Math] image of continuous function is compact and connected.
general-topology
Best Answer
As noted the dense issue does not make sense.
As for connectedness and compactness:
If the image of any continuos $f:X\to \mathbb {R}$ is connected then $X$ must be connected too since if $X$ is disconnected, say it is the disjoint union of opens $U$ and $V$ then the function mapping $U$ to 0 and $V$ to 1 is continuous with a disconnected image. Clearly, the codomain here being $\mathbb {R}$ can be replaced by any topological space with at least two separable points.
If the image of any continuos $f:X\to \mathbb {R}$ is compact then $X$ need not be compact. Take $X=\mathbb {N}$ with the topology generated by the opens $[0,n]=\{0,1,2,\cdots , n\}$ for all $n\in \mathbb {N}$. $X$ is not compact since the infinite cover $\{[0,n]\mid n\in \mathbb {N}\}$ admits no finite subcover. However, every continuous $f:X\to \mathbb {R}$ is constant, and thus has compact image. To see that notice that for every open $U$ in $X$ if $k\in U$ then $n\in U$ for all $n\le k$. In particular no two non-empty open subsets are disjoint. Now, if $f$ were not constant, say $x,y$ with $x\ne y$ would be in its image then since $x,y$ can be separated by disjoint opens in $\mathbb {R}$ the inverse image of of these opens would have to be non-empty and disjoint. A contradiction.