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Tony Huynh
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Topological spaces that resemble the space of irrationals

(This question actually arose in some research on number theory.)

I once learned that any countable dense subspace of any Euclidean space ℝn is homeomorphic to the rationals ℚ.

Now I wonder if something similar is true for the irrationals J := ℝ - ℚ (with the subspace topology from ℝ).

Let c denote the cardinality of the continuum.

I. Is each cartesian power Jn homeomorphic to J ?

Also, how far can this be pushed?

II. Let X be a dense totally disconnected subspace of ℝn such that every neighborhood of each point of X contains c points. Is X homeomorphic to J ?

What about for such subspaces of fairly nice subspaces of ℝn ?

IIa. Let X be any subspace of ℝn as described in II., and let B denote any subspace of ℝn homeomorphic to [the open unit ball in ℝn union any subset of its boundary]. Then is X ∩ B homeomorphic to J ?

And what about greater generality ?

III. Is there a simple set of conditions that describe exactly all spaces (or subspaces of ℝn) that are homeomorphic to J ? What about Jn ? (Perhaps the word homogeneous or metric needs to be included.)

(I found nothing relevant via Google, in MathSciNet, or here on MathOverflow.)

Daniel Asimov
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