A universal space is a topological space that contains a homeomorphic image of every topological space of a certain class.
A metric space is said to be universal for a family of metric
spaces
if any space from
is isometrically embeddable in
. Fréchet (1910) proved that
, the space of all bounded
sequences of real numbers endowed with a supremum
norm, is a universal space for the family
of all separable metric
spaces. Holsztynski (1978) proved that there exists a metric
on
, inducing the usual topology,
such that every finite metric
space embeds in
(Ovchinnikov 2000).