On punctured locally compact spaces

Abstract

In a recent paper \cite{T} the fact that a class of locally compact metric spaces $X$, among which are Euclidean spaces, are not homemorphic to their punctured version $X\men\{p\}$, was given an interesting new proof which does not use algebraic topology; essential tools of this proof are a boundedly compact metric structure, and path--connectedness near infinity. Here we show that local compactness and ordinary connectedness near infinity suffice; no metrizability is needed, and moreover we can also delete whole compact subsets, not only single points. Some non--homeomorphism results on many--holed Euclidean balls are also obtained. This note ought to distil the essence of the method developed in \cite{T}.