In the mathematical field of topology, a homeomorphism, topological isomorphism, or bicontinuous function is a continuous function between topological spaces that has a continuousinverse function. Homeomorphisms are the isomorphisms in the category of topological spaces—that is, they are the mappings that preserve all the topological properties of a given space. Two spaces with a homeomorphism between them are called homeomorphic, and from a topological viewpoint they are the same. The word homeomorphism comes from the Greek words ' = similar or same and ' = shape, form, introduced to mathematics by Henri Poincaré in 1895. Very roughly speaking, a topological space is a geometric object, and the homeomorphism is a continuous stretching and bending of the object into a new shape. Thus, a square and a circle are homeomorphic to each other, but a sphere and a torus are not. However, this description can be misleading. Some continuous deformations are not homeomorphisms, such as the deformation of a line into a point. Some homeomorphisms are not continuous deformations, such as the homeomorphism between a trefoil knot and a circle. An often-repeated mathematical joke is that topologists can't tell the difference between a coffee cup and a donut, since a sufficiently pliable donut could be reshaped to the form of a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while preserving the donut hole in the cup's handle.
Definition
A function between two topological spaces is a homeomorphism if it has the following properties:
A homeomorphism is sometimes called a bicontinuous function. If such a function exists, and are homeomorphic. A self-homeomorphism is a homeomorphism from a topological space onto itself. "Being homeomorphic" is an equivalence relation on topological spaces. Its equivalence classes are called homeomorphism classes.
The Euclidean real line is not homeomorphic to the unit circle as a subspace of R2, since the unit circle is compact as a subspace of Euclidean R2 but the real line is not compact.
The one-dimensional intervals and are not homeomorphic because no continuous bijection could be made.
Properties
Two homeomorphic spaces share the same topological properties. For example, if one of them is compact, then the other is as well; if one of them is connected, then the other is as well; if one of them is Hausdorff, then the other is as well; their homotopy and homology groups will coincide. Note however that this does not extend to properties defined via a metric; there are metric spaces that are homeomorphic even though one of them is complete and the other is not.
Every self-homeomorphism in can be extended to a self-homeomorphism of the whole disk .
Informal discussion
The intuitive criterion of stretching, bending, cutting and gluing back together takes a certain amount of practice to apply correctly—it may not be obvious from the description above that deforming a line segment to a point is impermissible, for instance. It is thus important to realize that it is the formal definition given above that counts. In this case, for example, the line segment possesses infinitely many points, and therefore cannot be put into a bijection with a set containing only a finite number of points, including a single point. This characterization of a homeomorphism often leads to a confusion with the concept of homotopy, which is actually defined as a continuous deformation, but from one function to another, rather than one space to another. In the case of a homeomorphism, envisioning a continuous deformation is a mental tool for keeping track of which points on space X correspond to which points on Y—one just follows them as X deforms. In the case of homotopy, the continuous deformation from one map to the other is of the essence, and it is also less restrictive, since none of the maps involved need to be one-to-one or onto. Homotopy does lead to a relation on spaces: homotopy equivalence. There is a name for the kind of deformation involved in visualizing a homeomorphism. It is an isotopy between the identity map on X and the homeomorphism from X to Y.
