We give necessary and sufficient conditions for certain pushouts of topological spaces in the category of Čech’s closure spaces to agree with their pushout in the category of topological spaces. We prove that in these two categories, the constructions of cell complexes by a finite sequence of closed cell attachments, which attach arbitrarily many cells at a time, agree. Likewise, the constructions of CW complexes relative to a compactly generated weak Hausdorff space that attach only finitely many cells, also agree. On the other hand, we give examples showing that the constructions of finite-dimensional CW complexes, CW complexes of finite type, and relative CW complexes that attach only finitely many cells, need not agree.

We provide two methods to characterise the connectedness of all d-dimensional generalised Sierpiński sponges whose corresponding iterated function systems (IFSs) are allowed to have rotational and reflectional components. Our approach is to reduce it to an intersection problem between the coordinates of graph-directed attractors. More precisely, let $(K_1,\ldots,K_n)$ be a Cantor-type graph-directed attractor in ${\mathbb {R}}^d$. By creating an auxiliary graph, we provide an effective criterion for whether $K_i\cap K_j$ is empty for every pair of $1\leq i,j\leq n$. Moreover, the emptiness can be checked by examining only a finite number of geometric approximations of the attractor. The approach is also applicable to more general graph-directed systems.

In topological modal logic, it is well known that the Cantor derivative is more expressive than the topological closure, and the ‘elsewhere’, or ‘difference’, operator is more expressive than the ‘somewhere’ operator. In 2014, Kudinov and Shehtman asked whether the combination of closure and elsewhere becomes strictly more expressive when adding the Cantor derivative. In this paper we give an affirmative answer: in fact, the Cantor derivative alone can define properties of topological spaces not expressible with closure and elsewhere. To prove this, we develop a novel theory of morphisms which preserve formulas with the elsewhere operator.

This paper investigates topological reconstruction, related to the reconstruction conjecture in graph theory. We ask whether the homeomorphism types of subspaces of a space X which are obtained by deleting singletons determine X uniquely up to homeomorphism. If the question can be answered affirmatively, such a space is called reconstructible. We prove that in various cases topological properties can be reconstructed. As main result we find that familiar spaces such as the reals ℝ, the rationals ℚ and the irrationals ℙ are reconstructible, as well as spaces occurring as Stone–Čech compactifications. Moreover, some non-reconstructible spaces are discovered, amongst them the Cantor set C.

Define a second order tree to be a map between trees (with fixed codomain). We show that many properties of ordinary trees have analogs for second order trees. In particular, we show that there is a notion of “definition by recursion on a well-founded second order tree” which generalizes “definition by transfinite recursion”. We then use this new notion of definition by recursion to prove an analog of Lusin’s Separation theorem for closure spaces of global sections of a second order tree.

We present a structure theorem for a broad class of homeomorphisms of finite order on countable zero dimensional spaces. As applications we show the following.

1. (a) Every countable nondiscrete topological group not containing an open Boolean subgroup can be partitioned into infinitely many dense subsets.

2. (b) If $G$ is a countably infinite Abelian group with finitely many elements of order 2 and $\beta G$ is the Stone–Čech compactification of $G$ as a discrete semigroup, then for every idempotent $p\,\,\in \,\,\beta G\backslash \{0\}$ , the subset $\{p,-p\}\subset \beta G$ generates algebraically the free product of one-element semigroups $\{p\}$ and $\{-p\}$ .

The homotopy groups of a finite partially ordered set (poset) can be described entirely in the context of posets, as shown in a paper by $\text{B}$ . Larose and $\text{C}$ . Tardif. In this paper we describe the relative version of such a homotopy theory, for pairs $\left( X,\,A \right)$ where $X$ is a poset and $A$ is a subposet of $X$ . We also prove some theorems on the relevant version of the notion of weak homotopy equivalences for maps of pairs of such objects. We work in the category of reflexive binary relational structures which contains the posets as in the work of Larose and Tardif.

We prove that a topological space X has a locally connected regular T 1, extension if and only if X is the underlying topological space of a nearness space Y which is concrete, regular and uniformly locally uniformly connected.

In [3], Reed establishes a bijection between the (equivalence classes of) principal T1 -extensions of a topological space X and the compatible, cluster-generated, Lodato nearnesses on X. We extend Reed's result to the T0 case by obtaining a one-to-one correspondence between the principal T0 -extensions of a space X and the collections of sets (called “t-grill sets”) which generate a certain class of nearnesses which we call “t-bunch generated” nearnesses. This correspondence specializes to principal T0-compactifications. Finally, we show that there is a bijection between these t-grill sets and the filter systems of Thron [5], and that the corresponding extensions are equivalent.

An ultrafilter completion is constructed for a nearness space. It is shown to preserve the Tl separation axiom. Characterizing conditions are given for it to be topological or for its topology to be compact. It is shown to have the simple extension topology and for a given Hausdorff space a compatible nearness structure is found for which its ultrafilter completion is homeomorphic to the Katetov H-closed extension.