No label defined (Q4394844)

The title of the contribution is rather truthful. The authors illustrate on the development of the concept of Tychonoff spaces and Čech-Stone compactification, and of adjoints and adjoint functor theorems ``difficulties encountered when condensing history to remarks about history''. After presenting a short (but interesting in itself) background of the history of general topology and abstract category theory, the authors come to topological reflections and coreflections. Then they treat the development of basic coreflective classes: \(k\)-spaces, sequential spaces, finitely generated spaces, locally connected spaces and some generalizations of those classes. For topological reflections, the following cases are traced: spaces satisfying various separation axioms, compact Hausdorff spaces, realcompact spaces, completely uniformizable spaces, 0-dimensional compact spaces, \(k\)-compact spaces, and generalizations like \(E\)-compact spaces or \(E\)-regular spaces (and \(\mathcal E\)-variations). The text is accompanied by diagrams showing briefly the corresponding development. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0888.54001].