scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1301922
This interesting article on the history of set-theoretic topology covers the time from 1906 to 1951. Although it centers around the history of developments and developable topological spaces, it also provides some interesting information about the evolution of set-theoretic topology in the USA in general. In the fall of 1906 E. H. Moore gave a series of lectures at Yale University in which he outlined a very general approach to the study of certain classes of functions. His aim was ``to establish a setting for doing analysis in which the special theories of linear equations which he desired to unify could be regarded as special instances of a general theory. These ideas were published by the AMS in 1910 under the title ``Introduction to a Form of General Analysis. It was in these lectures that E. H. Moore introduced the concept of a ``development for an abstract class which he had abstracted from the notion of a partition as it is used in defining the Riemann integral. Also in 1906 there appeared the thesis of M. Fréchet in which he introduced distance functions and in which he began his investigations on various axioms concerning abstract structures defined by the convergence of sequences. At about the same time F. Riesz suggested that a general notion of space should be based on the concept of neighborhood (1907). In the main part of Shore's paper it is shown how these basic ideas finally came together through the work of E. R. Hedrick (1911), R. E. Root (1911, 1914), T. H. Hildebrandt (1912), R. L. Moore (1915, 1916, 1927), A. D. Pitcher (1918, 1919), and, in particular, E. W. Chittenden (1915, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1927, 1929) to build the foundation of set-theoretic topology. Of course, the important work of F. Hausdorff, P. S. Alexandroff, P. Urysohn, and the Polish school of topologists is also mentioned, but the main focus in this paper is on the work of the above mentioned Americans, with the exception of Hedrick all students of E. H. Moore. Around 1930 the theory of general topological spaces had reached a state in which it seemed to be appropriate to summarize the ideas in a monograph. The first books to appear were by R. L. Moore (1932), C. Kuratowski (1933), W. Sierpinski (1934), P. Alexandroff and H. Hopf (1935), and E. Čech (1936). Another milestone in the history of set-theoretic topology was the year 1937 when F. B. Jones, a student of R. L. Moore, named Moore spaces and proved that if \(2^{\aleph_1}>2^{\aleph_0}\), then every separable normal Moore space is metrizable. His question, whether every normal Moore space is metrizable, i.e. the ``The Normal Moore Space Problem, was of great influence for the further development of set-theoretic topology in particular in the USA. Shore's article ends with a discussion of R. H. Bing's paper on the metrization of topological spaces from 1951. It was in this paper that R. H. Bing, another student of R. L. Moore, introduced the notion of a developable space and proved that a topological space is metrizable if and only if it is developable and collectionwise normal. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0902.54001].
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