Convergence (Q5905375)

This paper surveys various ideas of convergence and their connections with topology, completion, and to a lesser extend, uniformity. In addition, --- it sketches the origins of abstract axiomatic treatments of convergence (as their extensive bibliography shows, these began to appear before topology became the paradigm for convergence), --- it mentions several forms of convergence in classical analysis that lie beyond topology, and --- it points out the use of Cauchy structures instead of (filter) uniformities in constructing completions. Those introductory remarks motivate the real theme of the paper: that most ideas of convergence or Cauchy structure fit neatly into the context of merotopic spaces. After conversion from symbols to words, the abstract explains: ``\dots the category of symmetric convergence spaces and the category of Cauchy spaces are embedded as full subcategories of Katětov's category of filter merotopic spaces. [The former] are pleasantly related to their subcategories of reciprocal convergence spaces, reciprocal pretopological spaces and Hausdorff topological spaces, not only by sequences of reflectors or coreflectors, but also in that they can be built out of these subcategories by taking merotopic subspaces.'' The last fact exploits a major distinction between merotopy and topology: merotopic subspaces and products may differ from their counterparts in topology. The authors make it fairly easy for a lay reader: they give all the definitions and just enough detail to describe the various types of space and the (co)reflectors that appear, leaving much of the hard work to the originators cited in the bibliography. (One of these works, W. A. Robertson's 1975 Thesis at Carleton University, may perhaps be hard to get.).