BOUNDING THE MINIMUM ORDER OF Aπ-BASE

Abstract

AbstractLetXbe a topological space. A family ℬ of nonempty open sets inXis called aπ-base ofXif for each open setUinXthere existsB∈ℬ such thatB⊂U. The order of aπ-base ℬ at a pointxis the cardinality of the family ℬx={B∈ℬ:x∈B} and the order of theπ-base ℬ is the supremum of the orders of ℬ at each pointx∈X. A classical theorem of Shapirovskiĭ [‘Special types of embeddings in Tychonoff cubes’, in:Subspaces of Σ-Products and Cardinal Invariants, Topology, Coll. Math. Soc. J. Bolyai, 23 (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 1055–1086; ‘Cardinal invariants in compact Hausdorff spaces’,Amer. Math. Soc. Transl.134(1987), 93–118] establishes that the minimum order of aπ-base is bounded by the tightness of the space when the space is compact. Since then, there have been many attempts at improving the result. Finally, in [‘The projectiveπ-character bounds the order of aπ-base’,Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.136(2008), 2979–2984], Juhász and Szentmiklóssy proved that the minimum order of aπ-base is bounded by the ‘projectiveπ-character’ of the space for any topological space (not only for compact spaces), improving Shapirovskiĭ’s theorem. The projectiveπ-character is in some sense an ‘external’ cardinal function. Our purpose in this paper is, on the one hand, to give bounds of the projectiveπ-character using ‘internal’ topological properties of the subspaces on compact spaces. On the other hand, we give a bound on the minimum order of aπ-base using other cardinal functions in the frame of general topological spaces. Open questions are posed.