Stone-Čech compactification

Stone-Čech compactification is a technique for embedding a Tychonoff topological space in a compact Hausdorff space.

Let $X$ be a Tychonoff space and let $C$ be the space of all continuous functions from $X$ to the closed interval $[0,1]$ . To each element $x\in X$ , we may associate the evaluation functional $e_{x}\colon C\to[0,1]$ defined by $e_{x}(f)=f(x)$ . In this way, $X$ may be identified with a set of functionals.

The space $[0,1]^{C}$ of all functionals from $C$ to $[0,1]$ may be endowed with the Tychonoff product topology. Tychonoff’s theorem asserts that, in this topology, $[0,1]^{C}$ is a compact Hausdorff space. The closure in this topology of the subset of $[0,1]^{C}$ which was identified with $X$ via evaluation functionals is $\beta X$ , the Stone-Čech compactification of $X$ . Being a closed subset of a compact Hausdorff space, $\beta X$ is itself a compact Hausdorff space.

This construction has the wonderful property that, for any compact Hausdorff space $Y$ , every continuous function $f\colon X\to Y$ may be extended to a unique continuous function $\beta f\colon\beta X\to Y$ .

Title	Stone-Čech compactification
Canonical name	StonevCechCompactification
Date of creation	2013-03-22 14:37:38
Last modified on	2013-03-22 14:37:38
Owner	rspuzio (6075)
Last modified by	rspuzio (6075)
Numerical id	10
Author	rspuzio (6075)
Entry type	Definition
Classification	msc 54D30