MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).

2 added 17 characters in body

"A continuous image of a locally compact space is locally compact."

This is tempting because it is true without the "locally"s and it is often the case that topological properties and statements can be "localized". This came up in a problem session for my [number theory!] course this semester, and although the students were too experienced to accept it without proof, they had no alarm bells in their heads to prevent them from entertaining the possibility.

The way to quash this (as well as Andrew L.'s answer, which reminded me of this) is to realize that if it were true, every space $X$ would be locally compact, since the identity map from $X$ endowed with the discrete topology to $X$ is a continuous bijection.

The way to quash this (as well as Andrew L.'s answer, which reminded me of this) is to realize that if it were true, every space $X$ would be locally compact, since the identity map from $X$ endowed with the discrete topology to $X$ is a continuous bijection.