Compactifications of products of metric spaces and their relations to Čech-Stone and Smirnov compactifications (Q1313930)

As one can investigate compactifications of uniform spaces, the authors investigate compactifications of members of the epireflective hull of metric spaces in the category of approach spaces. There are close connections of such compactifications to the Smirnov or Čech-Stone ones. In particular, some fine metrics can be extended to distance functions between points and sets on \(\beta X\), fully describing the topology of \(\beta X\). Such a distance function is described and studied on \(\beta N\).