# An answer to a question of Pyrih1991 Math. Subject Classification — Primary: 54G05; Secondary: 54G99, 54H05. Key words and phrases — extremally disconnected, open-normal, discrete.

A topological space $`(X,\tau )`$ is called extremally disconnected  if the closure of every open set is open. Recently, Pyrih  defined a space $`X`$ to be open-normal if for any two disjoint open sets $`A`$ and $`B`$ there exist disjoint closed sets $`F_A`$ and $`F_B`$ such that $`AF_A`$ and $`BF_B`$. He asked if every open-normal space is discrete. The answer to his question is no.

Proposition 1. A topological space $`(X,\tau )`$ is open-normal if and only if it is extremally disconnected.

Proof. Assume first that $`X`$ is open-normal. Let $`A`$ be an open subset of $`X`$. Then, $`A`$ and $`B=X\mathrm{cl}(A)`$ are disjoint open sets and hence there exist disjoint closed sets $`F_A`$ and $`F_B`$ such that $`AF_A`$ and $`BF_B`$. Clearly, $`F_A=\mathrm{cl}(A)`$ and $`F_B=B`$. Hence, $`\mathrm{cl}(A)=XF_B`$ is open. Thus, $`X`$ is extremally disconnected.

Assume next that $`X`$ is extremally disconnected. If $`A`$ and $`B`$ are disjoint open subsets of $`X`$, then $`\mathrm{cl}(A)`$ and $`X\mathrm{cl}(A)`$ are disjoint open sets containing $`A`$ and $`B`$ respectively. $`\mathrm{}`$

It is well-known that there exist extremally disconnected non-discrete spaces: the Stone-Čech compactification of every discrete space, etc. A detailed bibliography on the recent progress of the study of extremally disconnected spaces may be found in .

In , Pyrih proved that every extremally disconnected metric space is discrete. A much better result exists. In , Gleason proved that every convergent sequence $`(x_1,x_2,\mathrm{})`$ of an extremally disconnected Hausdorff space is stationary. Recall that a sequence $`(x_1,x_2,\mathrm{})`$ is called stationary if for some $`n`$, we have $`x_n=x_{n+1}=x_{n+2}=\mathrm{}`$. As a consequence of Gleason’s result we have the following:

Proposition 2. Every sequential Hausdorff space which is extremally disconnected is discrete.

Note that the following implications hold and none of them is reversible:

Metric $``$ First countable and Hausdorff $``$ Fréchet and Hausdorff $``$ Sequential and Hausdorff.

E-mail: dontchev@cc.helsinki.fi