A generic approach to measuring the strength of completeness/compactness of various types of spaces and ordered structures (Q2050189)

The generic approach mentioned in the title is that of imposing conditions on families of subsets of a given set. Thus, a \emph{ball structure}, \(\mathcal{B}\), on a set~\(X\) is simply a subfamily of~\(\mathcal{P}(X)\); its members are called \emph{balls}. The authors give a five-by-three matrix of properties that such a family may have; the three columns are indexed by `chain', `downward directed system', and `centered system' respectively. The five rows are indexed by the type of intersection the system can have; just non-empty, or containing a specific type of ball, or even being a ball. Each property then states that every system of the column type has an intersection of the row type.\par The authors compare these notions, investigate when they are equivalent, and give various examples of structures: certainly the family of balls of a metric space forms a ball structure, as does the family of closed intervals in a linearly ordered set, or the family of closed sets in a compact space. In that latter case the whole matrix collapses, which follows from (or reproves) the well-known theorem that a space is compact iff every chain of nonempty closed sets has a nonempty intersection.\par Using the matrix the authors classify various completeness properties of structures, e.g., compactness corresponds to the collapsed matrix, and completeness for metric spaces is related to countable chains of balls. At the same time ball structures provide an opportunity to consider fixed-point theorems from a general point of view. Many of the contraction-like conditions that one sees in the literature have their version in suitable ball structures.