Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The concept of an even cover is introduced early in elementary topology courses and is known to be valuable. Among other facts it is known that X is paracompact if and only if every open cover of X is even. In this paper we introduce the concept of an n-even cover and show its usefulness. Using n-even we define an embedding that on closed subsets is equivalent to collectionwise normal. We also give sufficient conditions for a point finite open cover to have a locally finite refinement and also sufficient conditions for this refinement to be even. Finally we show that the collection of all neighborhoods of the diagonal of X is a uniformity if and only if every even cover is normal. This last result is particularly interesting in light of the fact that every normal open cover is even.