Flimsy Spaces

Abstract

We study $n$-flimsy spaces, which are the topological spaces that remain connected when removing fewer than $n$ points but become disconnected when removing exactly $n$ points. We show that no such space exists for $n\ge 3$, and that the compact $2$-flimsy spaces are precisely the dense and order-complete cyclically ordered sets equipped with their order topology. Furthermore, we examine variants of the definition obtained by replacing connectedness by path-connectedness, where paths are either parametrized by $[0,1]$ or by arbitrary compact linear continua.

38 pages, 7 figures, 3 diagrams