Feebly compact paratopological groups and real-valued functions

Abstract

We present several examples of feebly compact Hausdorff paratopological groups (i.e., groups with continuous multiplication) which provide answers to a number of questions posed in the literature. It turns out that a 2-pseudocompact, feebly compact Hausdorff paratopological group $G$ can fail to be a topological group. Our group $G$ has the Baire property, is Fréchet–Urysohn, but it is not precompact. It is well known that every infinite pseudocompact topological group contains a countable non-closed subset. We construct an infinite feebly compact Hausdorff paratopological group $G$ all countable subsets of which are closed. Another peculiarity of the group $G$ is that it contains a nonempty open subsemigroup $C$ such that $C^{-1}$ is closed and discrete, i.e., the inversion in $G$ is extremely discontinuous. We also prove that for every continuous real-valued function $g$ on a feebly compact paratopological group $G$, one can find a continuous homomorphism $\varphi$ of $G$ onto a second countable Hausdorff topological group $H$ and a continuous real-valued function $h$ on $H$ such that $g=h\circ \varphi$. In particular, every feebly compact paratopological group is $\mathbb{R }_3$ -factorizable. This generalizes a theorem of Comfort and Ross established in 1966 for real-valued functions on pseudocompact topological groups.