Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
All topological spaces shall be uniformizable (completely regular Hausdorff). A uniformity on X shall be viewed as a collection μ of coverings of X, via the manner of Tukey [20] and Isbell [16], and the associated uniform space denoted μX. Given the uniformizable topological space X, we shall be concerned with compatible uniformities as follows (discussed more carefully in § 1). The fine uniformity α (finest compatible with the topology); the “cardinal reflections“ αm of α (m an infinite cardinal number) ; αc, the weak uniformity generated by the real-valued continuous functions.
With μ standing, generically, for one of these uniformities, we consider the question: when is μ(X × Y) = μX × μY For μ = αℵ0 (the finest compatible precompact uniformity), the problem is equivalent to that of when
β(X × Y) = βX × βY,
β denoting Stone-Cech compactification; this is answered by the theorem of Glicksberg [9]. For μ = α, we have Isbell's generalization [16, VI1.32].