In mathematics, a bitopological space is a set endowed with twotopologies. Typically, if the set is and the topologies are and then the bitopological space is referred to as . The notion was introduced by J. C. Kelly in the study of quasimetrics, i.e. distance functions that are not required to be symmetric.
A map from a bitopological space to another bitopological space is called continuous or sometimes pairwise continuous if is continuous both as a map from to and as map from to .
Corresponding to well-known properties of topological spaces, there are versions for bitopological spaces.
A bitopological space is pairwise compact if each cover of with , contains a finite subcover. In this case, must contain at least one member from and at least one member from
A bitopological space is pairwise Hausdorff if for any two distinct points there exist disjoint and with and .
A bitopological space is pairwise zero-dimensional if opens in which are closed in form a basis for , and opens in which are closed in form a basis for .
A bitopological space is called binormal if for every -closed and -closed sets there are -open and -open sets such that , and