On the existence of remote points (Q1110130)

There are considered locally compact, non-pseudocompact (completely regular) spaces X without isolated points (a typical example: real line) and their Čech-Stone compactifications \(\beta\) X. Roughly speaking, a point in \(\beta\) X-X is called far, if it belongs to the closure of a subset of X only if that subset is in a sense large, for instance, if it is not discrete, not nowhere dense etc. The author shows that the following subtle distinctions can appear: (1) there exists a point in \(\beta\) X-X lying in the closure of a discrete subset of X (i.e., being not far with respect to discrete subsets of X) but which does not lie in the closure of any discrete closed subset of X (i.e., being far with respect to discrete closed subsets of X), and, (2) if in addition, X satisfies the Souslin property hereditarily, then there exists a point in \(\beta\) X-X distinguishing in the described above way nowhere dense subsets of X from discrete ones. First results in this direction were obtained by \textit{E. K. van Douwen} [Diss. Math. 188, 45 p. (1981; Zbl 0525.54018)].