Existence and structure theorems for semigroup compactifications (Q788121)

The first theorem of this paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of subdirect products for a semitopological semigroup S to have a universal right topological semigroup compactification of a given type. Examples illustrate how it may be used to produce quickly semigroup compactifications of almost periodic type, as well as a variety of others. The authors derive the theorem in an elementary fashion from the Hahn-Banach and Stone-Weierstrass theorems. The second theorem describes the structure of right topological group compactifications of S in terms of a descending chain of group compactifications which enjoy certain joint continuity conditions at each level.