On countable closed covers of compact spaces (Q2295662)

The basic concept in this paper is that of a \textit{derivative with respect to a cover}, which gets its inspiration from the Cantor-Bendixson derivative. If \(Y\) is a topological space and \(\mathcal{A}\) is a cover of \(Y\), then denote by \(Y'\) the complement in \(Y\) of the union of the interiors of the sets in \(\mathcal{A}\). (This is the usual Cantor-Bendixson derivative when \(\mathcal{A}\) is the family of singletons.) When \(Z\) is a subset if \(Y\), we form the derivative \(Z'\), relative to \(Y\), using the restriction of \(\mathcal{A}\) to \(Z\); hence we may repeat the derivative process: \(Y^0:=Y\); \(Y^{\alpha+1}:=(Y^{\alpha})'\); for limit ordinal \(\alpha\), \(Y^{\alpha}:=\bigcap_{\eta<\alpha}Y^{\eta}\). This forms a decreasing chain of subsets of \(Y\); the ordinal \(\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A})\) is the least \(\alpha\) such that \(Y^{\alpha+1}=Y^{\alpha}\). In the present paper, the authors compare \(\mbox{ht}(X;f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}])\) and \(\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A})\), where \(f:X\to Y\) is a continuous surjection between compact Hausdorff spaces, \(\mathcal{A}\) is a countable closed cover of \(Y\), and \(f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}]\) is the pre-image cover of \(X\). It is a basic fact that \(\mbox{ht}(X;f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}])\leq\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A})\) always holds; the authors provide bounds on the difference. For example, Theorem 3.2 tells us that \(\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A})<\omega\cdot\mbox{ht}(X;f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}])\), and Theorem 3.5 provides, for each \(\alpha<\omega_1\) and \(n<\omega\), a situation where \(\mbox{ht}(X;f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}])=\alpha+1\) and \(\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A})=\omega\cdot\alpha+n+1\). In Theorem 3.7 it is shown that \(\mbox{ht}(Y;\mathcal{A}^*)\leq \mbox{ht}(X;f^{-1}[\mathcal{A}])\), where \(\mathcal{A}^*\) is the family of all finite unions of members of \(\mathcal{A}\).