A topology on is a collection of subsets of , that is: it is a subset of the , with the following properties:
- For any
- For any such that is finite
Note that is not a topology so long as is infinite. For example pick some then every singleton where is open in because is infinite, if it were to be a topology then we would know that is open, but which is finite, thus a contradiction, so it cannot be a topology.
suppose that and are two topologies on a given set . If , then is finer than . If the reverse inclusion is true, then we say that is coarser than , there are also strict variations of these definitions for the strict inclusions.
given two topologies, they are comparable if at least one is finer than the other