Topological groups and the Pontryagin-van Kampen duality. An introduction (Q2040920)

As the title of the book suggests, it is basically split into two parts. The first part contains a carefully written introduction to topological groups, starting with the basic facts, it contains, within others, countability axioms and metrisation, connectedness, completeness and completion as well as (local) compactness, the Bohr-compactification and an open-mapping-theorem. The second part paves the way to an elementary proof of the Pontryagin duality theorem for locally compact abelian topological groups. Here the theorem of Peter-Weyl on the existence of non-trivial continuous characters in the compact case is proved using Følner's theorem. Applications of the duality-theorem follow, in particular a structure theory for these groups. A special chapter is devoted to the study of pseudocompact groups. Many examples and exercises allow a deeper understanding of the subject, many counterexamples show the limits of certain statements. At the end of each chapter there are interesting comments pointing to further results. The book contains a comparatively long appendix giving the needed facts in group theory, topology and category theory for the reader without solid background in these areas. Altogether, this is a very recommendable book in an interesting area of mathematics.