Topological Notions
The open disk and the closed disk are not homeomorphic, since the latter is compact and the former is not. However from the viewpoint of algebraic topology they share many properties: both of them are contractible and so are homotopy equivalent to a single point. This implies that their fundamental groups are trivial, and all homology groups are trivial except the 0th one, which is isomorphic to Z. The Euler characteristic of a point (and therefore also that of a closed or open disk) is 1.
Every continuous map from the closed disk to itself has at least one fixed point (we don't require the map to be bijective or even surjective); this is the case n=2 of the Brouwer fixed point theorem. The statement is false for the open disk: consider for example
which maps every point of the open unit disk to another point of the open unit disk slightly to the right of the given one.
Read more about this topic: Disk (mathematics)
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