Cardinal characteristics and the product of countably many infinite cyclic groups (Q1337439)

The author investigates, from a set-theoretic point of view, the subgroups of the countable direct product \(\Pi = Z^{\aleph_ 0}\) of integers for which all the homomorphisms to the group of integers \(Z\) annihilate almost all of the standard unit vectors. The smallest possible size of such a subgroup is related to a number of standard cardinal characteristics of the continuum and the results improve on earlier estimates of Eda's. Some new group-theoretic questions are raised as well as set-theoretic properties together with combinatorially natural associated cardinals of interest independently from the algebraic context. This is a good scholarly paper.