The Order Structure of Continua

A continuum is here a primitive notion intended to correspond precisely to a path-connected subset of the usual euclidean space. In contrast, however, to the traditional treatment, we treat here continua not as pointsets, but as irreducible entities equipped only with a partial ordering ≤ interpreted as parthood. Our aim is to examine what basic topological and geometric properties of continua can be expressed in the language of ≤, and what principles we need in order to prove elementary facts about them. Surprisingly enough ≤ suffices to formulate the very heart of continuity (=jumpless and gapless transitions) in a general setting. Further, using a few principles about ≤ (together with the axioms of ZFC), we can define points, joins, meets and infinite closeness. Most important, we can develop a dimension theory based on notions like path, circle, line (=one-dimensional continuum), simple line and surface (=two-dimensional continuum), recovering thereby in a rigorous way Poincaré's well-known intuitive idea that dimension expresses the ways in which a continuum can be torn apart. We outline a classification of lines according to the number of circles and branching points they contain. The ordering (C,≤) is a topped and bottomed, atomic, almost dense and complete partial ordering, weaker than a lattice. Continuous transformations from C to C are also defined in a natural way and results about them are proved. The key notions on which the dimension theory is based are the “minimal extensions of continua”, or “joins”, and the “splittings of continua over subcontinua”. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.