Isolated point

In mathematics, a point x is called an

isolated point of a subset S (in a
topological space X) if x is an element of
S but there exists a neighborhood of x
which does not contain any other points
of S. This is equivalent to saying that the
singleton {x} is an open set in the
topological space S (considered as a "0" is an isolated point of A = {0} ∪ [1, 2]
subspace of X). If the space X is a
Euclidean space (or any other metric
space), then x is an isolated point of S if there exists an open ball around x which contains no other points of
S. (Introducing the notion of sequences and limits, one can say equivalently that an element x of S is an
isolated point of S if and only if it is not a limit point of S.)

Contents
Discrete set
Standard examples
A counter-intuitive example
See also
References
External links

Discrete set
A set that is made up only of isolated points is called a discrete set (see also discrete space). Any discrete
subset S of Euclidean space must be countable, since the isolation of each of its points together with the fact
the rationals are dense in the reals means that the points of S may be mapped into a set of points with
rational coordinates, of which there are only countably many. However, not every countable set is discrete,
of which the rational numbers under the usual Euclidean metric are the canonical example.

A set with no isolated point is said to be dense-in-itself (every neighbourhood of a point contains other
points of the set). A closed set with no isolated point is called a perfect set (it has all its limit points and none
of them are isolated from it).

The number of isolated points is a topological invariant, i.e. if two topological spaces and are
homeomorphic, the number of isolated points in each is equal.

Standard examples
Topological spaces in the following examples are considered as subspaces of the real line with the standard
topology.
 For the set , the point 0 is an isolated point.
For the set , each of the points 1/k is an isolated point, but 0 is not
an isolated point because there are other points in S as close to 0 as desired.
The set of natural numbers is a discrete set.
The Morse lemma states that non-degenerate critical points of certain functions are isolated.

A counter-intuitive example
Consider the set of points in the real interval such that every digit of their binary representation
fulfills the following conditions:

Either or .
only for finitely many indices .
If denotes the biggest index such that , then .
If and , then exactly one of the following two conditions holds: ,
. Informally, this condition means that every digit of the binary representation of which equals
to 1 belongs to a pair ...0110..., except for ...010... at the very end.

Now, is an explicit set consisting entirely of isolated points[1] which has the counter-intuitive property
that its closure is an uncountable set.[2]

Another set with the same properties can be obtained as follows. Let be the middle-thirds Cantor set,
let be the component intervals of , and let be a set consisting of one point from
each . Since each contains only one point from , every point of is an isolated point. However, if
is any point in the Cantor set, then every neighborhood of contains at least one , and hence at least one
point of . It follows that each point of the Cantor set lies in the closure of , and therefore has
uncountable closure.

See also
Acnode
Adherent point
Limit point

References
1. Gomez-Ramirez 2007, p.146-147
2. Gomez-Ramirez 2007, p. 146

Gomez-Ramirez, Danny (2007), "An explicit set of isolated points in R with uncountable
closure" (http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=46815211), Matemáticas: Enseñanza
universitaria, Escuela Regional de Matemáticas. Universidad del Valle, Colombia, 15: 145–147

External links
Weisstein, Eric W. "Isolated Point" (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/IsolatedPoint.html).
MathWorld.
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This page was last edited on 6 May 2020, at 08:16 (UTC).

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