Topological groups: Basic constructions

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce several most important notions and constructions concerning topological groups and operations with them. In particular, we develop the technique of prenorms on groups, describe in detail the construction of the Raĭkov completion of a topological group, prove a theorem on embeddings of topological groups into groups of isometries in the topology of pointwise convergence. We also introduce the class of locally compact topological groups and provide the reader with the first basic facts about groups in this class (deeper results in this direction will be presented in Chapter 9). Then we define and study the important classes of !-narrowtopological groups and of precompact (equivalently, totally bounded) topological groups. We finish this chapter with the Hartman{Mycielski construction of an embedding of an arbitrary topological group into a connected, locally pathwise connected topological group.