Abelian semigroups whose Stone-Čech compactifications have left ideal decompositions

Abstract

Stone-Čech compactifications of semigroups have aroused a good deal of interest recently. Several authors, for example Milnes [6], Marcri [5] and Baker and Butcher [1], have concentrated on problems of the existence of continuous extensions to βSof the operation in a topological semigroupS.For a discrete semigroup a separately continuous extension always exists, and others such as Pym and Vasudeva[8] have studied the compactifications of particular classes of semigroups. Further interest has centred on the algebraic structure of these compactifications; see for example Hindman[3].