A topological characterization of ordinals: van Dalen and Wattel revisited (Q408563)

\textit{J. van Dalen} and \textit{E. Wattel} [General Topology Appl. 3, 347--354 (1973; Zbl 0272.54026)] characterized linearly ordered topological spaces and generalized ordered spaces. The authors of this paper give a new proof of the mentioned result using the notion of nests (i.e. collections linearly ordered by inclusion) of open sets. They also use nests to characterize spaces \(X\) which are homeomorphic to an ordinal, or to a subspace of an ordinal, or admit a continuous bijection onto ordinals.