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Paracompact space

A paracompact space is a topological space in which every open cover admits an open locally finite refinement. (Sometimes paracompact spaces are required to be Hausdorff, but not in Wikipedia). The terms are defined as follows: Note the similarity between the definitions of compact and paracompact: for paracompact we replace "subcover" by "open refinement" and "finite" by "locally finite". Both of these changes are significant: if we take the above definition of paracompact and change "open refinement" back to "subcover", or "locally finite" back to "finite", we end up with the compact spaces in both cases.

Table of contents
1 Examples
2 Properties
3 Counterexamples
4 Variations

Examples

Properties

The most important feature of paracompact Hausdorff spaces is that they are normal and admit partitions of unity relative to any open cover. This means the following: if X is a paracompact Hausdoff space with a given open cover, then there exists a collection of continuous functions on X with values in the unit interval [0,1] such that:

Partitions of unity are useful because they often allow one to extend local constructions to the whole space. For instance, the integral of differential forms on paracompact manifolds is first defined locally (where the manifold looks like Euclidean space and the integral is well known), and this definition is then extended to the whole space via a partition of unity.

Counterexamples

As you might guess from the generality of most of the examples above, it's actually harder to think of spaces that aren't paracompact than to think of spaces that are. The most famous counterexample is the long line, which is a nonparacompact topological manifold. (The long line is locally compact, but not second countable.) Another counterexample is a product of uncountably many copies of an infinite discrete space.

Most mathematicians who use point set topology, rather than investigate it in its own right, regard nonparacompact spaces as pathological. For example, manifolds are often (although not in Wikipedia) defined to be paracompact, thus allowing integration of differential forms to be defined as in the previous section, while excluding the long line, which is useless in almost every application.

Variations

There are several mild variations of the notion of paracompactness. To define them, we first need to extend the list of terms above:

A topological space X is metacompact if every open cover has an open pointwise finite refinement, and fully normal if every open cover has an open star refinement. The adverb "countably" can be added to any of the adjectives "paracompact", "metacompact", and "fully normal" to make the requirement apply only to countable open covers.

As you might guess from the terminology, a fully normal space is normal. Any space that is fully normal must be paracompact, and any space that is paracompact must be metacompact. In fact, for Hausdorff spaces, paracompactness and full normality are equivalent. Thus, a fully T4 space (that is, a fully normal space that is also T1; see Separation axioms) is the same thing as a paracompact Hausdorff space.