For a space X let $\mathcal {K}(X)$ be the set of compact subsets of X ordered by inclusion. A map $\phi :\mathcal {K}(X) \to \mathcal {K}(Y)$ is a relative Tukey quotient if it carries compact covers to compact covers. When there is such a Tukey quotient write $(X,\mathcal {K}(X)) \ge _T (Y,\mathcal {K}(Y))$, and write $(X,\mathcal {K}(X)) =_T (Y,\mathcal {K}(Y))$ if $(X,\mathcal {K}(X)) \ge _T (Y,\mathcal {K}(Y))$ and vice versa.

We investigate the initial structure of pairs $(X,\mathcal {K}(X))$ under the relative Tukey order, focussing on the case of separable metrizable spaces. Connections are made to Menger spaces.

Applications are given demonstrating the diversity of free topological groups, and related free objects, over separable metrizable spaces. It is shown a topological group G has the countable chain condition if it is either $\sigma $-pseudocompact or for some separable metrizable M, we have $\mathcal {K}(M) \ge _T (G,\mathcal {K}(G))$.

In this article, we introduce a hierarchy on the class of non-archimedean Polish groups that admit a compatible complete left-invariant metric. We denote this hierarchy by $\alpha $-CLI and L-$\alpha $-CLI where $\alpha $ is a countable ordinal. We establish three results:

1. (1) G is $0$-CLI iff $G=\{1_G\}$;

2. (2) G is $1$-CLI iff G admits a compatible complete two-sided invariant metric; and

3. (3) G is L-$\alpha $-CLI iff G is locally $\alpha $-CLI, i.e., G contains an open subgroup that is $\alpha $-CLI.

Subsequently, we show this hierarchy is proper by constructing non-archimedean CLI Polish groups $G_\alpha $ and $H_\alpha $ for $\alpha <\omega _1$, such that:

1. (1) $H_\alpha $ is $\alpha $-CLI but not L-$\beta $-CLI for $\beta <\alpha $; and

2. (2) $G_\alpha $ is $(\alpha +1)$-CLI but not L-$\alpha $-CLI.

Given a continuous and isometric action of a Polish group G on an adequate Polish topometric space $(X,\tau ,\rho )$ and $x \in X$, we find a necessary and sufficient condition for $\overline {Gx}^{\rho }$ to be co-meagre; we also obtain a criterion that characterizes when such a point exists. This work completes a criterion established in earlier work of the authors.

We introduce and prove the consistency of a new set theoretic axiom we call the Invariant Ideal Axiom. The axiom enables us to provide (consistently) a full topological classification of countable sequential groups, as well as fully characterize the behavior of their finite products.

We also construct examples that demonstrate the optimality of the conditions in IIA and list a number of open questions.

In finite group theory, chief factors play an important and well-understood role in the structure theory. We here develop a theory of chief factors for Polish groups. In the development of this theory, we prove a version of the Schreier refinement theorem. We also prove a trichotomy for the structure of topologically characteristically simple Polish groups.

The development of the theory of chief factors requires two independently interesting lines of study. First we consider injective, continuous homomorphisms with dense normal image. We show such maps admit a canonical factorisation via a semidirect product, and as a consequence, these maps preserve topological simplicity up to abelian error. We then define two generalisations of direct products and use these to isolate a notion of semisimplicity for Polish groups.

The paper gives a simple proof of Graev’s theorem (asserting that the free product of Hausdorff topological groups is Hausdorff) for a particular case which includes the countable case of $k_\omega $ -groups and the countable case of Lindelöf P-groups. For this it is shown that in these particular cases the topology of the free product of Hausdorff topological groups coincides with the $X_0$ -topology in the Mal’cev sense, where X is the disjoint union of the topological groups identifying their units.

To study when a paratopological group becomes a topological group, Arhangel’skii et al. [‘Topological games and topologies on groups’, Math. Maced. 8 (2010), 1–19] introduced the class of $(\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-unfavourable spaces. We show that every $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$-complete (or normal) $(\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-unfavourable semitopological group is a topological group. We prove that the product of a $(\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-unfavourable space and a strongly Fréchet $(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-favourable space is $(\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-unfavourable. We also show that continuous closed irreducible mappings preserve the $(\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD},G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F1}})$-unfavourableness in both directions.

We study the locally compact abelian groups in the class ${\mathfrak E_{ \lt \infty }}$ , that is, having only continuous endomorphisms of finite topological entropy, and in its subclass $\mathfrak E_0$ , that is, having all continuous endomorphisms with vanishing topological entropy. We discuss the reduction of the problem to the case of periodic locally compact abelian groups, and then to locally compact abelian p-groups. We show that locally compact abelian p-groups of finite rank belong to ${\mathfrak E_{ \lt \infty }}$ , and that those of them that belong to $\mathfrak E_0$ are precisely the ones with discrete maximal divisible subgroup. Furthermore, the topological entropy of endomorphisms of locally compact abelian p-groups of finite rank coincides with the logarithm of their scale. The backbone of the paper is the Addition Theorem for continuous endomorphisms of locally compact abelian groups. Various versions of the Addition Theorem are established in the paper and used in the proofs of the main results, but its validity in the general case remains an open problem.

We study the following problem: For which Tychonoff spaces $X$ do the free topological group $F(X)$ and the free abelian topological group $A(X)$ admit a quotient homomorphism onto a separable and nontrivial (i.e., not finitely generated) group? The existence of the required quotient homomorphisms is established for several important classes of spaces $X$, which include the class of pseudocompact spaces, the class of locally compact spaces, the class of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}$-compact spaces, the class of connected locally connected spaces, and some others.

We also show that there exists an infinite separable precompact topological abelian group $G$ such that every quotient of $G$ is either the one-point group or contains a dense non-separable subgroup and, hence, does not have a countable network.

Answering a longstanding problem originating in Christensen’s seminal work on Haar null sets [Math. Scand. 28 (1971), 124–128; Israel J. Math. 13 (1972), 255–260; Topology and Borel Structure. Descriptive Topology and Set Theory with Applications to Functional Analysis and Measure Theory, North-Holland Mathematics Studies, 10 (Notas de Matematica, No. 51). (North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam–London; American Elsevier Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1974), iii+133 pp], we show that a universally measurable homomorphism between Polish groups is automatically continuous. Using our general analysis of continuity of group homomorphisms, this result is used to calibrate the strength of the existence of a discontinuous homomorphism between Polish groups. In particular, it is shown that, modulo $\text{ZF}+\text{DC}$, the existence of a discontinuous homomorphism between Polish groups implies that the Hamming graph on $\{0,1\}^{\mathbb{N}}$ has finite chromatic number.

We prove completeness for the main examples of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and some related topological groups. Consider a sequence $G_{1}\subseteq G_{2}\subseteq \cdots \,$ of topological groups $G_{n}$ n such that $G_{n}$ is a subgroup of $G_{n+1}$ and the latter induces the given topology on $G_{n}$, for each $n\in \mathbb{N}$. Let $G$ be the direct limit of the sequence in the category of topological groups. We show that $G$ induces the given topology on each $G_{n}$ whenever $\cup _{n\in \mathbb{N}}V_{1}V_{2}\cdots V_{n}$ is an identity neighbourhood in $G$ for all identity neighbourhoods $V_{n}\subseteq G_{n}$. If, moreover, each $G_{n}$ is complete, then $G$ is complete. We also show that the weak direct product $\oplus _{j\in J}G_{j}$ is complete for each family $(G_{j})_{j\in J}$ of complete Lie groups $G_{j}$. As a consequence, every strict direct limit $G=\cup _{n\in \mathbb{N}}G_{n}$ of finite-dimensional Lie groups is complete, as well as the diffeomorphism group $\text{Diff}_{c}(M)$ of a paracompact finite-dimensional smooth manifold $M$ and the test function group $C_{c}^{k}(M,H)$, for each $k\in \mathbb{N}_{0}\cup \{\infty \}$ and complete Lie group $H$ modelled on a complete locally convex space.

We consider the following question: for which metrizable separable spaces $X$ does the free abelian topological group $A(X\oplus X)$ isomorphically embed into $A(X)$. While for many natural spaces $X$ such an embedding exists, our main result shows that if $X$ is a Cook continuum or $X$ is a rigid Bernstein set, then $A(X\oplus X)$ does not embed into $A(X)$ as a topological subgroup. The analogous statement is true for the free boolean group $B(X)$.

We study automorphism groups of randomizations of separable structures, with focus on the ℵ0-categorical case. We give a description of the automorphism group of the Borel randomization in terms of the group of the original structure. In the ℵ0-categorical context, this provides a new source of Roelcke precompact Polish groups, and we describe the associated Roelcke compactifications. This allows us also to recover and generalize preservation results of stable and NIP formulas previously established in the literature, via a Banach-theoretic translation. Finally, we study and classify the separable models of the theory of beautiful pairs of randomizations, showing in particular that this theory is never ℵ0-categorical (except in basic cases).

We develop the basics of an analogue of descriptive set theory for functions on a Polish space X. We use this to define a version of the small index property in the context of Polish topometric groups, and show that Polish topometric groups with ample generics have this property. We also extend classical theorems of Effros and Hausdorff to the topometric context.

Given a class ${\cal C}$ of subgroups of a topological group G, we say that a subgroup $H \in {\cal C}$ is a universal${\cal C}$subgroup of G if every subgroup $K \in {\cal C}$ is a continuous homomorphic preimage of H. Such subgroups may be regarded as complete members of ${\cal C}$ with respect to a natural preorder on the set of subgroups of G. We show that for any locally compact Polish group G, the countable power Gω has a universal Kσ subgroup and a universal compactly generated subgroup. We prove a weaker version of this in the nonlocally compact case and provide an example showing that this result cannot readily be improved. Additionally, we show that many standard Banach spaces (viewed as additive topological groups) have universal Kσ and compactly generated subgroups. As an aside, we explore the relationship between the classes of Kσ and compactly generated subgroups and give conditions under which the two coincide.

A metric space $\text{M=}\left( M;\text{d} \right)$ is homogeneous if for every isometry $f$ of a finite subspace of $\text{M}$ to a subspace of $\text{M}$ there exists an isometry of $\text{M}$ onto $\text{M}$ extending $f$. The space $\text{M}$ is universal if it isometrically embeds every finite metric space $\text{F}$ with $\text{dist}\left( \text{F} \right)\subseteq \text{dist}\left( \text{M} \right)$ (with $\text{dist}\left( \text{M} \right)$ being the set of distances between points in $\text{M}$).

A metric space $U$ is a Urysohn metric space if it is homogeneous, universal, separable, and complete. (We deduce as a corollary that a Urysohn metric space $U$ isometrically embeds every separable metric space $\text{M}$ with $\text{dist}\left( \text{M} \right)\subseteq \text{dist}\left( U \right)$.)

The main results are: (1) A characterization of the sets $\text{dist}\left( U \right)$ for Urysohn metric spaces $U$. (2) If $R$ is the distance set of a Urysohn metric space and $\text{M}$ and $\text{N}$ are two metric spaces, of any cardinality with distances in $R$, then they amalgamate disjointly to a metric space with distances in $R$. (3) The completion of every homogeneous, universal, separable metric space $\text{M}$ is homogeneous.

In this paper, it is shown that there exists a connected topological group which is not homeomorphic to any $\omega $-narrow topological group, and also that there exists a zero-dimensional topological group $G$ with neutral element $e$ such that the subspace $X = G\setminus \{e\}$ is not homeomorphic to any topological group. These two results give negative answers to two open problems in Arhangel’skii and Tkachenko [Topological Groups and Related Structures (Atlantis Press, Amsterdam, 2008)]. We show that if a compact topological group is a $K$-space, then it is metrisable. This result gives an affirmative answer to a question posed by Malykhin and Tironi [‘Weakly Fréchet–Urysohn and Pytkeev spaces’, Topology Appl. 104 (2000), 181–190] in the category of topological groups. We also prove that a regular $K$-space $X$ is a weakly Fréchet–Urysohn space if and only if $X$has countable tightness.

Following a similar result of Uspenskij on the unitary group of a separable Hilbert space, we show that, with respect to the lower (or Roelcke) uniform structure, the Polish group $G\,=\,\text{Aut(}\mu \text{)}$ of automorphisms of an atomless standard Borel probability space $(X,\,\mu )$ is precompact. We identify the corresponding compactification as the space of Markov operators on ${{L}_{2}}(\mu )$ and deduce that the algebra of right and left uniformly continuous functions, the algebra of weakly almost periodic functions, and the algebra of Hilbert functions on $G$, i.e., functions on $G$ arising from unitary representations, all coincide. Again following Uspenskij, we also conclude that $G$ is totally minimal.

The variety of topological groups generated by the class of all abelian kω-groups has been shown to equal the variety of topological groups generated by the free abelian topological group on [0, 1]. In this paper it is proved that the free abelian topological group on a compact Hausdorff space X generates the same variety if and only if X is not scattered.

We give some general results concerning continuity of measurable homomorphisms of topological groups. As a consequence we show that a Christensen measurable homomorphism of a Polish abelian group into a locally compact topological group is continuous. We also obtain similar results for the universally measurable homomorphisms and the homomorphisms that have the Baire property.