Topological groups and related structures (Q931626)

This book is devoted to the area of topological groups, with special emphasis on its topological properties. All in all, more general structures, such as semitological groups or paratopological groups are also treated in depth throughout the text. Thus, it provides a systematic and comprehensive exposition of most main results accomplished in the are area since the last half of the twentieth century. Basically all results presented by the authors are given with complete and detailed proofs. Moreover, they are accompanied with many pertinent examples and related open questions for future research. A very attractive section on historical comments and references is given at the end of every chapter. Finally, an extensive bibliography is provided at the end of the book. Some sample results included in this book are: Bouziad's theorem asserting that every Čech-complete semitopological group is a topological group; the Ivanovskij-Kuz'minov theorem on the dyadicity of compact groups; Čech-complete groups; cardinal invariants of topological groups, including Tkachenko's result about the cellularity of \(\sigma\)-compact groups; Moscow groups and the Dieudonné completion of a topological group, including Arhangel'skii's example of a topological group whose Dieudonné completion is not a topological group; pseudocompact groups, including Comfort-Ross's theorem on the product of pseudocompact groups; free topological groups, including Nummela-Pestov's theorem about the free subgroup generated by a topological subspace, and the completeness of free topological abelian groups; \(\mathbb{R}\)-factorizable topological groups; the basic facts of Pontryagin-van Kampen duality are presented in a thorough and very elegant way, including the Krein-Milman theorm, the Gel'fand-Mazur theorem, the separation of points by characters in a compact abelian group, a commutative version of Varapoulos's theorem asserting that every sequentially continuous group homomorphism defined between compact groups is continuous, Bohr topology and many of its properties, and pseudocompact groups, including Dikranjan-Shakhmatov's results on the existence of pseudocompact topologies; finally, an introduction to topological dynamics is given, including Uspenskij's theorem proving that every compact Hausdorff space admitting a continuous transitive action of an \(\omega\)-narrow topological group is a Dugundji compactum. Although this book can be used as a complete introduction to the theory of general topological groups, it also provides the more advanced reader with the powerful techniques developed in the area of topological groups recently. Most probably, it will become a classic reference source in the area of topological groups. Thus, it is highly recommended to all people interested in the topological structure of topological groups.