General Topology – Are Fixed Points in Non-Hausdorff Space Always Closed?

continuitygeneral-topologyseparation-axioms

It is not hard to show that if $f: X \rightarrow X$ is a continuous map and $X$ is a Hausdorff space, then the set of fixed points is closed in $X$. We basically just look at the diagonal and consider the map $g: X \rightarrow X \times X$ defined by $g(x)=(x,f(x))$.

What happens if we drop the condition that $X$ is Hausdorff? I guess the set of fixed points is not closed anymore. What would be an example? I tried looking at the cofinite topology but didn't find an example.

Best Answer

Here is a nice example. Let $X$ be a set with $|X|>2$, and give $X$ the trivial topology (so the only open sets are $\varnothing$ and $X$). Let $a,b\in X$ be distinct points. Then the map $f:X\to X$ with $f(a)=b$, $f(b)=a$, and $f(x)=x$ for any $x\neq a,b$ has as its set of fixed points $X\setminus\{a,b\}$, which is not closed because the only closed sets are $\varnothing$ and $X$.

It is easy to see that $X$ is not Hausdorff; because the only open sets available to us are $\varnothing$ and $X$, we can't separate distinct points with disjoint open sets.