Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
The long open problem raised by I. Kaplansky if, for an infinite compact Hausdorff space X, there is a discontinuous homomorphism from (X) into a Banach algebra was settled in the 1970s, independently, by H. G. Dales and J. Esterle. If the continuum hypothesis is assumed, then there is a discontinuous homomorphism from (X) (see [8] for a survey of both approaches and [9] for a unified exposition). The techniques developed by Dales and Esterle are powerful enough to yield discontinuous homomorphisms from commutative Banach algebras other than (X). In fact, every commutative Banach algebra with infinitely many characters is the domain of a discontinuous homomorphism ([7]).