Moore plane


In mathematics, the Moore plane, also sometimes called Niemytzki plane, is a topological space. It is a completely regular Hausdorff space that is not normal. It is named after Robert Lee Moore and Viktor Vladimirovich Nemytskii.

Definition

If is the upper half-plane, then a topology may be defined on by taking a local basis as follows:
That is, the local basis is given by
Thus the subspace topology inherited by is the same as the subspace topology inherited from the standard topology of the Euclidean plane.

Properties

The fact that this space M is not normal can be established by the following counting argument :
  1. On the one hand, the countable set of points with rational coordinates is dense in M; hence every continuous function is determined by its restriction to, so there can be at most many continuous real-valued functions on M.
  2. On the other hand, the real line is a closed discrete subspace of M with many points. So there are many continuous functions from L to. Not all these functions can be extended to continuous functions on M.
  3. Hence M is not normal, because by the Tietze extension theorem all continuous functions defined on a closed subspace of a normal space can be extended to a continuous function on the whole space.
In fact, if X is a separable topological space having an uncountable closed discrete subspace, X cannot be normal.