Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Stone-Čech compactifications of semigroups have aroused a good deal of interest recently. Several authors, for example Milnes [6], Marcri [5] and Baker and Butcher [1], have concentrated on problems of the existence of continuous extensions to βS of the operation in a topological semigroup S. For a discrete semigroup a separately continuous extension always exists, and others such as Pym and Vasudeva[8] have studied the compactifications of particular classes of semigroups. Further interest has centred on the algebraic structure of these compactifications; see for example Hindman[3].