Directed sets and topological spaces definable in o-minimal structures. Pablo And´ujarGuerrero∗ Margaret E. M. Thomas ∗ Erik Walsbergy 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 03C64 (Primary), 54A20, 54A05, 54D30 (Secondary). Key words. o-minimality, directed sets, definable topological spaces. Abstract We study directed sets definable in o-minimal structures, show- ing that in expansions of ordered fields these admit cofinal definable curves, as well as a suitable analogue in expansions of ordered groups, and furthermore that no analogue holds in full generality. We use the theory of tame pairs to extend the results in the field case to definable families of sets with the finite intersection property. We then apply our results to the study of definable topologies. We prove that all de- finable topological spaces display properties akin to first countability, and give several characterizations of a notion of definable compactness due to Peterzil and Steinhorn [PS99] generalized to this setting. 1 Introduction The study of objects definable in o-minimal structures is motivated by the notion that o-minimality provides a rich but \tame" setting for the theories of said objects. In this paper we study directed sets definable in o-minimal structures, focusing on expansions of groups and fields. By \directed set" we mean a preordered set in which every finite subset has a lower (if downward ∗Department of Mathematics, Purdue University, 150 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067, U.S.A. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (And´ujarGuer- rero),
[email protected] (Thomas) yDepartment of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, Department of Math- ematics, University of California, Irvine, 340 Rowland Hall (Bldg.# 400), Irvine, CA 92697-3875, U.S.A.