Axiomatic characterizations of the dimension of metric spaces (Q1341411)

Menger's five axioms of dimension theory fail to characterize covering dimension, dim, on the class of metric spaces. Hayashi (1990) showed that a simple decomposition axiom was independent of Menger's axiom and sufficient to characterize dim on the class of finite dimensional separable metric spaces. The author continues this notion by providing an axiomatic characterization of dim for the class of all metric spaces. Because of the lack of metric compactifications, Menger's compactification axiom must be modified. The author introduces the notion of virtual embedding and shows that every metric space can be virtually embedded into a compact metric space of the same dimension. Virtual embeddings appear to be very well-behaved with respect to covering dimension and inverse limits of metric spaces; several interesting propositions establishing properties are given. These properties of virtual embeddings allow the author to give various axiomatic characterizations of covering dimension for the class of all metric spaces and investigate virtual embeddings in relation to cohomological dimension. The author concludes with a number of examples establishing the independence of the axioms.