scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1301924
Every topologist has, at one time or another, encountered uniform spaces, if only to learn that complete regularity is equivalent to uniformizability. Of course there is more to uniform spaces than that; for example the structure of uniformities themselves can lead to interesting combinatorial problems [see e.g. \textit{J. Pelant}, Semin. uniform Spaces, Prague 1973-1974, 149-158 (1975; Zbl 0326.54020)]. The authors sketch the historical developments that ultimately lead to the definition of uniform structures. The story begins with the discovery by Bolzano and Cauchy that Cauchy-sequences in the reals are convergent -- this is possibly the first time that a notion of `close to each other' occurs, rather than `close to a point'. The need to formalize `close to each other' permeates much of the history of the subject: uniform continuity, uniform convergence, completeness and completions. For a while Fréchets écarts (metrics) filled this need but they had their limitations because they are of an essentially countable nature. Work on topological groups ultimately lead to the formulation of the axioms for uniform spaces, where \textit{A. Weil}'s presentation [Sur les espaces à structure uniforme et sur la topologie générale, Actual. Sci. Ind. Publ. Inst. Math. Univ. Strasbourg, fasc. 1 (1938; Zbl 0019.18604)] proved fundamental. They go on to describe the rich history of uniform spaces and their connection with Efimov's proximity spaces, whose genesis is described as well. This first section of the paper is well worth reading. I was less impressed with the second section where the authors describe attempts to deal with certain (in some eyes undesirable) phenomena that come with the territory: for example the family of all open covers of a space is a base for a uniformity if and only if the space is paracompact. These attempts produced merotopic spaces, nearness spaces and the like. Whereas the authors make clear that in the first section necessity proved to be the mother of invention, so to speak, in this reviewer's eyes that necessity is absent in the second section and this makes it much less clear why we should be interested in the development of the classes described therein. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0902.54001].
- Morita-extensions and nearness-completions
- Uniform sheaves and differential equations
- A study of uniformities on the space of uniformly continuous mappings
- On the epireflective hull of top in near
- Unique nearness structures
- Histoire des espaces complets
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 589321 (Why is no real title available?)
- Simultaneous extension of continuous and uniformly continuous functions
- Straight nearness spaces
- A concept for resemblance in large scale geometry
- Uniform environments as a general framework for metrics and uniformities
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