CONNEXION PROPERTIES AND FACTORISATION THEOREMS

Abstract

With the introduction of several new factorisation theorems, this paper is intended to show that previous efforts of the authors [3] [5] and of Strecker [15] to describe the factorisations involving connectedness are incomplete. In Section 1 we give a purely topological construction of such a factorisation, in which the right factor is the class of spreads and the left factor has a certain property hereditarily: crucially, not all members of the left factor need be quotients. Section 2 shows that, given a left factor consisting of onto maps in the category T of topological spaces, then the class of mappings with the relevant properties hereditarily is also a left factor, and the result of section 1 is a particular case of this. Section 3 combines the material in [3] on intrinsic connexion properties with ideas of Preuss (see [1]) on disconnectednesses to yield another range of factorisations, for example, involving the maps with strongly connected fibres; and Section 4 notes some outstánding problems which our work has provoked.