TITLE: What does Liu mean by "topological open/closed immersion" in his book "Algebraic Geometry and Arithmetic Curves"?
QUESTION [17 upvotes]: In his book "Algebraic Geometry and Arithmetic Curves", Liu defines open/closed immersions of locally ringed spaces in terms of topological open/closed immersions:

What does he mean by the terms "topological open (resp. closed) immersion"?
Does he mean that

$f(X)$ is an open (resp. closed) subset of $Y\!,\,$ and
the induced map $X\to f(X); \;x \mapsto f(x)$ is a homeomorphism?

Many thanks! :)

REPLY [8 votes]: Yes, that's a correct definition. Yours (1.) is also equivalent to 2. below.

$f(X)$ is open (closed) and $f$ is a homeomorphism on its image
$f$ is open (closed) and a homeomorphism on its image

If we then define an immersion to be a homeomorphism on its image, then an open (closed) immersion really is an immersion that is open (closed).
Note: it is also called an embedding, which is safer to use than immersion, because it is closer to the terminology used in differential geometry.