Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
We consider minimal left ideals L of the universal semigroup compactification of a topological semigroup S. We show that the enveloping semigroup of L is homeomorphically isomorphic to if and only if given q ≠ r in , there is some p in the smallest ideal of with qp ≠ rp. We derive several conditions, some involving minimal flows, which are equivalent to the ability to separate q and r in this fashion, and then specialize to the case that S = , and the compactification is . Included is the statement that some set A whose characteristic function is uniformly recurrent has .