Meaning of : Set is closed under finite intersections and arbitrary unions I have been working through "Set theory for working mathematician" and near the end of chapter about real numbers there is a small bit of topology.
Namely the natural topology $\tau$ on euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^n$ is defined as set of all open balls in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and then it says that such a set is closed under finite intersections and arbitrary unions.What does it mean?
Also what does it mean that some set is closed under some operation?
 A: "closed under finite intersections" means that if $A_1,A_2,\ldots, A_k$ are each in the set, then their mutual intersection $A_1\cap A_2\cap \cdots \cap A_k$ is in the set.  However this must be a finite collection of elements, i.e. $k<\infty$.
"closed under arbitrary unions" means something stronger.  If $\mathcal{A}$ is a collection of sets, i.e. $\mathcal{A}=\{A_1, A_2,\ldots\}$, then the union of all of them is again in the set, i.e. $\cup \mathcal{A}=A_1\cup A_2\cup\cdots$ (the dots may conceal uncountably many elements of $\mathcal{A}$, and uncountably many unions in $\cup \mathcal{A}$).
In particular, if $\mathcal{A}$ is finite, this means closed under finite unions -- however $\mathcal{A}$ need not be finite.

Note that the natural topology is not closed under arbitrary intersections, for example let $A_i=(-\frac{1}{i},\frac{1}{i})$; the intersection of all of them is the single point $0$, which is not open.
A: A set being closed under some operation means that you can perform this operation, and the result will still be part of your set.
As an example: You have your set $X$, which is closed under finite intersections. This means that for every finite set $\left\{x_1,...,x_n\right\}\subseteq X$ we have $\cap_{i=1}^n{x_i}\in X$
