Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The purpose of this paper is to determine the conditions under which the maximal ideals of the ring C*(X)—the bounded real-valued continuous functions on a completely regular Hausdorff space X—are closed under pointwise convergence of sequences. Whereas the maximal ideals of C*(X) are closed under pointwise convergence of nets if and only if X is compact, it is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for their pointwise sequential closure is that X be pseudocompact (i.e. that all real-valued continuous functions of X be bounded).