We investigate what it means for a (Hausdorff, second-countable) topological group to be computable. We compare several potential definitions based on classical notions in the literature. We relate these notions with the well-established definitions of effective presentability for discrete and profinite groups, and compare our results with similar results in computable topology.

Roelcke non-precompactness, simplicity, and non-amenability of the automorphism group of the Fraïssé limit of finite Heyting algebras are proved among others.

We present a general framework for automatic continuity results for groups of isometries of metric spaces. In particular, we prove automatic continuity property for the groups of isometries of the Urysohn space and the Urysohn sphere, i.e. that any homomorphism from either of these groups into a separable group is continuous. This answers a question of Ben Yaacov, Berenstein and Melleray. As a consequence, we get that the group of isometries of the Urysohn space has unique Polish group topology and the group of isometries of the Urysohn sphere has unique separable group topology. Moreover, as an application of our framework we obtain new proofs of the automatic continuity property for the group $\text{Aut}([0,1],\unicode[STIX]{x1D706})$, due to Ben Yaacov, Berenstein and Melleray and for the unitary group of the infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert space, due to Tsankov.

We define a simple criterion for a homogeneous, complete metric structure X that implies that the automorphism group Aut(X) satisfies all the main consequences of the existence of ample generics: it has the automatic continuity property, the small index property, and uncountable cofinality for nonopen subgroups. Then we verify it for the Urysohn space $$, the Lebesgue probability measure algebra MALG, and the Hilbert space $\ell _2 $, thus proving that Iso($$), Aut(MALG), $U\left( {\ell _2 } \right)$, and $O\left( {\ell _2 } \right)$ share these properties. We also formulate a condition for X which implies that every homomorphism of Aut(X) into a separable group K with a left-invariant, complete metric, is trivial, and we verify it for $$, and $\ell _2 $.