English

Completeness of topological spaces: An induction-free review

General Topology 2026-03-06 v1

Abstract

Completeness for a (topological) space is often based on the existence of special structures (such as metrics, uniformities, proximities, convergences, etc) that explicitly induce the topology, making the completeness induction-dependent. However, in any given space X=(X,τ)X=(X,\tau), suppose we fix a base B\mathcal{B} of τ\tau that is \emph{graded}, in the sense it is partitioned as B=εEBε\mathcal{B}=\bigcup_{\varepsilon\in \mathcal{E}}\mathcal{B}_\varepsilon into open covers Bε\mathcal{B}_\varepsilon of XX, making X=(X,τ,B)X=(X,\tau,\mathcal{B}) a \emph{(graded) base space}. If we now relax the notion of \emph{convergence of nets} to a notion of \emph{approach between nets} in XX, then we obtain a more natural \emph{induction-free} notion of a \emph{cauchy net} in a base space, hence a corresponding \emph{induction-free} notion of \emph{completeness} for base spaces. We find that many classical concepts and results on completeness for uniform spaces carry over to completeness for a certain class of base spaces (named \emph{locally symmetric base spaces} or \emph{lsblsb-spaces}) that properly contains uniform spaces. The said classical results include characterization of compactness, Baire's theorem, existence of a completion, and completeness results for product and function lsblsb-spaces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.04627,
  title  = {Completeness of topological spaces: An induction-free review},
  author = {Earnest Akofor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04627},
  year   = {2026}
}