Neither open nor closed subspace of a vector space

general-topologynormed-spaces

Consider a vector space $V$ over $\mathbb{C}$ with some norm (and topology induced by that norm). I am trying to find a subspace $W \subset V$ such that it is neither open nor closed in the topology mentioned above?

Motivation: I have studied that every banach space is essentially a closed subspace of $\mathcal{C}(X)$ for some compact Hausdorff space $X$ and hence I thought that we could also have some structure for normed linear spaces if the answer to my question is negative.

Best Answer

For a different flavor of example, consider $C[0,1]$ with the uniform norm. By a standard theorem (Stone-Weierstrass), the space $P$ of polynomial functions is dense in this space. But then, since $P$ is dense but clearly not equal to the whole space, it can't be closed in it.

Most of the standard Banach spaces you know are separable - which, in practice, means that they have a "nice" dense subspace. That dense subspace is a non-closed subspace.

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