Neighbourhood (mathematics)

In topology and related areas of mathematics, a neighbourhood (or neighborhood)

is one of the basic concepts in a topological space. It is closely related to the
concepts of open set and interior. Intuitively speaking, a neighbourhood of a point is
a set of points containing that point where one can move some amount in any
direction away from that point without leaving the set.

Contents
Definitions
Neighbourhood of a point
Neighbourhood of a set A set in the plane is a
In a metric space neighbourhood of a point if a small
disc around is contained in .
Examples
Topology from neighbourhoods
Uniform neighbourhoods
Deleted neighbourhood
See also
References

Definitions

Neighbourhood of a point
If is a topological space and is a point in , a neighbourhood of is a subset of that includes an open set containing ,

This is also equivalent to being in the interior of .

Note that the neighbourhood need not be an open set itself. If is open it is called an open neighbourhood.[1] Some
mathematicians require that neighbourhoods be open, so it is important to note conventions.

A set that is a neighbourhood of each of its points is open since it can be expressed as the union of open sets containing each of its
points. A rectangle, as illustrated in the figure, is not a neighbourhood of all its points; points on the edges or corners of the rectangle
are not contained in any open set that is contained within the rectangle.

The collection of all neighbourhoods of a point is called theneighbourhood systemat the point.

Neighbourhood of a set
If is a subset of topological space then a neighbourhood of is a set that includes an open set containing . It follows
that a set is a neighbourhood of if and only if it is a neighbourhood of all the points in . Furthermore, it follows that is a
neighbourhood of iff is a subset of the interior of . The neighbourhood of a point is just a special case of this definition.
In a metric space
In a metric space , a set is a neighbourhood of a point if there
exists an open ball with centre and radius , such that

is contained in .

is called uniform neighbourhood of a set if there exists a positive number

A rectangle is not a neighbourhood
such that for all elements of ,
of any of its corners (or points on the
boundary).

is contained in .

For the -neighbourhood of a set is the set of all points in that are at
distance less than from (or equivalently, is the union of all the open balls of
radius that are centred at a point in ):

It directly follows that an -neighbourhood is a uniform neighbourhood, and that a

set is a uniform neighbourhood if and only if it contains an -neighbourhood for
some value of .
A set in the plane and a uniform
Examples neighbourhood of .

Given the set of real numbers with the usual Euclidean metric and a subset
defined as
The epsilon neighbourhood of a
number a on the real number line.

then is a neighbourhood for the set of natural numbers, but is not a uniform
neighbourhood of this set.
The set M is a neighbourhood of the
number a, because there is an ε-
Topology from neighbourhoods neighbourhood of a which is a subset
of M.
The above definition is useful if the notion ofopen set is already defined. There is an
alternative way to define a topology, by first defining the neighbourhood system, and
then open sets as those sets containing a neighbourhood of each of their points.

A neighbourhood system on is the assignment of afilter (on the set ) to each in , such that

1. the point is an element of each in

2. each in contains some in such that for each in , is in .

One can show that both definitions are compatible, i.e. the topology obtained from the neighbourhood system defined using open sets
is the original one, and vice versa when starting out from a neighbourhood system.

Uniform neighbourhoods
In a uniform space , is called a uniform neighbourhood of if is not close to , that is there exists no
entourage containing and .
Deleted neighbourhood
A deleted neighbourhood of a point (sometimes called a punctured neighbourhood) is a neighbourhood of , without . For
instance, the interval is a neighbourhood of in the real line, so the set
is a deleted neighbourhood of . Note that a deleted neighbourhood of a given point is not in fact
a neighbourhood of the point. The concept of deleted neighbourhood occurs in the
definition of the limit of a function.

See also
Tubular neighbourhood

References
1. Dixmier, Jacques (1984). General Topology. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Translated by Sterling K.
Berberian. Springer. p. 6. ISBN 0-387-90972-9. "According to this definition, anopen neighborhood of xis nothing
more than an open subset of E that containsx."

Kelley, John L. (1975). General topology. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-90125-6.
Bredon, Glen E. (1993). Topology and geometry. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-97926-3.
Kaplansky, Irving (2001). Set Theory and Metric Spaces. American Mathematical Society. ISBN 0-8218-2694-8.

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