In topology, the Tychonoff plank is a topological space defined using ordinal spaces that is a counterexample to several plausible-sounding conjectures. It is defined as the topological product of the two ordinal spaces and , where is the first infinite ordinal and the first uncountable ordinal. The deleted Tychonoff plank is obtained by deleting the point .
Let be the set of ordinals which are less than or equal to and the set of ordinals less than or equal to . The Tychonoff plank is defined as the set with the product topology.
The deleted Tychonoff plank is the subset , where is the plank with a corner removed.
The Tychonoff plank is a compact Hausdorff space and is therefore a normal space. However, the deleted Tychonoff plank is non-normal. Therefore the Tychonoff plank is not completely normal. This shows that a subspace of a normal space need not be normal. The Tychonoff plank is not perfectly normal because it is not a G<sub>ô</sub> space: the singleton is closed but not a G<sub>ô</sub> set.
The StoneâÂÂÃÂech compactification of the deleted Tychonoff plank is the Tychonoff plank.