Topology induced by a convergence criterion

functional-analysisgeneral-topologyweak-convergence

I have a quick question about how one might define a topology by giving a criterion for convergence instead of giving a definition of open sets.

This question arose in the context of the definition of the weak star topology on $\mathcal{C}^*(X)$. In my case $X$ was a compact metric space, $\mathcal{C}(X)$ was the space of continuous function from $X$ to $\mathbb{C}$ with respect to the supremum norm and $\mathcal{C}^*(X)$ was the space of continuous (with respect to the operator norm) linear maps to $\mathbb{C}$.

We then defined a new topology on $\mathcal{C}^*(X)$ by saying that $$T_n \rightharpoonup T \Longleftrightarrow \forall u\in \mathcal{C}(X): T_n u\rightarrow Tu.$$

I am having trouble seeing how one could define a topology from this notion of convergence.

EDIT: A user pointed out how to construct a topology such that the convergence in that topology is the convergence above. That is not exactly what I am interested in. My question relates more to wether by using the definition of convergence one can define the topology we want. (So it is like the opposite operation).

More generally if on any space (or maybe with more structure depending on what we need) we define a notion of convergence can we always find a suitable topology ?

Best Answer

In general the definition of a notion of convergence for sequences will not be enough to define all topologies, but only topologies that can be described by sequences (so-called sequential topologies). There will be some conditions that the sequence convergence definition/criterion has to meet, the most trivial one being that a constant sequence has to converge to that constant value.

In your case, I think most conditions will be met and we can define a set $C$ to be closed under the weak-star topology iff for all sequences where both $x_n \to x$ (under this definition) and and all $x_n \in C$, then $x \in C$ too.

Then this will probably obey the axioms for closed sets of a topology, under some conditions on $X$ or $C(X)$. Normally though, the open sets in weak-star topology are defined directly without convergence.