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[email protected] ISSN: 0146-4124 COPYRIGHT °c by Topology Proceedings. All rights reserved. TOPOLOGY PROCEEDINGS Volume 29, No.2, 2005 Pages 577-594 CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NEARLY PSEUDOCOMPACT SPACES AND RELATED SPACES BISWAJIT MITRA∗ AND SUDIP KUMAR ACHARYYA Abstract. Nearly pseudocompact spaces were initiated by Henriksen and Rayburn. Several topological characterizations of this space are found in literature but any algebraic de- scription is hardly noticed. In this paper we have furnished a number of algebraic descriptions of nearly pseudocompact spaces. In the process we have also introduced Hard pseu- docompact spaces, a generalization of pseudocompact spaces and obtained a few topological characterizations of this space. 1. Introduction Through out our paper, X will be assumed to be a Tychonoff space. It is well known that X is pseudocompact if and only if the Stone-Cechˇ compactification βX is identical with the Hewitt realcompactification υX. In 1980, Henriksen and Rayburn [8] gen- eralized the notion of pseudocompactness by defining a space to be nearly pseudocompact when and only when υX\X is dense in βX\X. These two authors have furnished several characterizations of nearly pseudocompact spaces, most of which by using the notion of hard sets, an entity introduced by the second author in [15]. The main result of their paper is that - X is nearly pseudocompact if 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 54C40; Secondary 46E25. Key words and phrases. Nearly pseudocompact space, hard set, hard pseudo- compact, continuous functions with hard support, nonzero ring homomorphism.