Countable Compagtifications

Abstract

It is assumed that all topological spaces discussed in this paper are Hausdorff. By a compactification αX of a space X we mean a compact space containing X as a dense subspace. If, for some positive integer n, αX — X consists of n points, we refer to αX as an n-point compactification of X, in which case we use the notation αn X. If αX — X is countable, we refer to αX as a countable compactification of X. In this paper, the statement that a set is countable means that its elements are in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. In particular, finite sets are not regarded as being countable. Those spaces with n-point compactifications were characterized in (3). From the results obtained there it followed that the only n-point compactifications of the real line are the well-known 1- and 2-point compactifications and the only n-point compactification of the Euclidean N-space, EN (N > 1), is the 1-point compactification.