Book Description

The fundamental property of compact spaces - that continuous functions defined on compact spaces are bounded - served as a motivation for E. Hewitt to introduce the notion of a pseudocompact space. The class of pseudocompact spaces proved to be of fundamental importance in set-theoretic topology and its applications. This clear and self-contained exposition offers a comprehensive treatment of the question, When does a group admit an introduction of a pseudocompact Hausdorff topology that makes group operations continuous? Equivalently, what is the algebraic structure of a pseudocompact Hausdorff group? The authors have adopted a unifying approach that covers all known results and leads to new ones, Results in the book are free of any additional set-theoretic assumptions.