The cocountable topology or countable complement topology on any set X consists of the empty set and all cocountable subsets of X, that is all sets whose complement in X is countable. It follows that the only closed subsets are X and the countable subsets of X. Symbolically, one writes the topology as
Every set X with the cocountable topology is Lindelöf, since every nonempty open set omits only countably many points of X. It is also T1, as all singletons are closed.
If X is an uncountable set then any two nonempty open sets intersect, hence the space is not Hausdorff. However, in the cocountable topology all convergent sequences are eventually constant, so limits are unique. Since compact sets in X are finite subsets, all compact subsets are closed, another condition usually related to the Hausdorff separation axiom.
The cocountable topology on a countable set is the discrete topology. The cocountable topology on an uncountable set is hyperconnected, thus connected, locally connected and pseudocompact, but neither weakly countably compact nor countably metacompact, hence not compact.
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In topology and related fields of mathematics, there are several restrictions that one often makes on the kinds of topological spaces that one wishes to consider. Some of these restrictions are given by the separation axioms. These are sometimes called Tychonoff separation axioms, after Andrey Tychonoff. The separation axioms are not fundamental axioms like those of set theory, but rather defining properties which may be specified to distinguish certain types of topological spaces.
In the mathematical field of general topology, a topological space is said to be metacompact if every open cover has a point-finite open refinement. That is, given any open cover of the topological space, there is a refinement that is again an open cover with the property that every point is contained only in finitely many sets of the refining cover. A space is countably metacompact if every countable open cover has a point-finite open refinement.
In mathematics, in the field of topology, a topological space is said to be pseudocompact if its image under any continuous function to R is bounded. Many authors include the requirement that the space be completely regular in the definition of pseudocompactness. Pseudocompact spaces were defined by Edwin Hewitt in 1948. For a Tychonoff space X to be pseudocompact requires that every locally finite collection of non-empty open sets of X be finite.