Talk:Pseudocompact space

I deleted the misleading remark (that pseudocompactness is an "unnecessarily weak" concept) added by User_talk:80.221.21.22. The remark is nonetheless understandable given the article's failure to state the motivation for pseudocompactness, namely that counterexamples to various propositions about connected and locally connected compact Abelian groups are repairable with "pseudocompact" in place of "compact," e.g. the groups Zp of p-adic integers and Q* of characters on Q valued in the circle group T (the Pontrjagin dual of Q), both of which admit a connected pseudocompact group topology, neither of which do so in the absence of "pseudo". The article would benefit from a motivating paragraph by someone familiar with pseudocompactness, and from some mention of Hewitt's role in formulating the concept. --Vaughan Pratt 21:27, 20 October 2007 (UTC)