Rectangularity of products and completions of their subsets (Q2268625)

Rectangularity is a useful tool in the study of products: it states that every finite normal open cover of the product has a \(\sigma\)-locally finite refinement consisting of cozero rectangles. By varying the type of normal covers in this definition and the refinements the author is able to give a unified treatment of product theorems for extensions, such as the Čech-Stone compactifications, the Hewitt realcompactification and others. The main idea is to look at the uniformities that determine these extensions. The same ideas are used in the study of bounded subsets of products, where a subset of a space is bounded is every continuous function on the ambient space is bounded on the set itself.