Countable compactifications and a generalized Hahn-Mazurkiewicz type theorem (Q1924657)

The well-known Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem tells us that a Hausdorff space is a continuous image of an arc if and only if it is a compact, connected, locally connected metric space and it readily follows from this that given any two nontrivial compact, connected, locally connected, metric spaces, each is the continuous image of the other. The author gets an analogous result for locally connected generalized continua, that is, connected, locally connected, locally compact separable metric spaces. He associates with many such spaces an ordinal number, which he defines inductively and calls the complementation degree of the space. He then uses this to define what he calls the \((\alpha,n)\) complementation property of a space where \(\alpha\) is a countable ordinal and \(n\) is a positive integer. One important thing about this concept is that a locally connected generalized continuum has the \((\alpha,n)\) complementation property if and only if the space has a maximal countable compactification of type \((\alpha,n)\) which means that the remainder of the space in that compactification is homeomorphic to the discrete union of \(n\) copies of \(\omega^\alpha\) where \(\omega\) is the smallest countable ordinal and \(\omega^\alpha\) has the order topology. In the main result of the paper, the author proves that if \(\alpha\) is any countable ordinal and \(n\) is any positive integer and if two locally connected generalized continua each have the \((\alpha,n)\) complementation property, then each is the image of the other under a perfect surjection. As a corollary, he is able to show that the remainders coincide for two locally connected generalized continua with the \((\alpha,n)\) complementation property.