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[email protected] ISSN: 0146-4124 COPYRIGHT °c by Topology Proceedings. All rights reserved. Topology Proceedings Volume 24, Summer 1999, 421–502 TOPOLOGICAL GROUPS: WHERE TO FROM HERE? Vladimir Pestov Abstract This is an account of one man’s view of the current perspective of theory of topological groups. We survey some recent developments which are, from our viewpoint, indicative of the future directions, concentrating on actions of topological groups on compacta, embeddings of topological groups, free topological groups, and ‘massive’ groups (such as groups of homeomorphisms of compacta and groups of isometries of various metric spaces). 1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation For a randomly selected mathematician outside of the field of general topology — or, to be more precise, ‘general topological algebra’ — the words ‘topological group’ most probably sound synonymous with ‘locally compact group.’ Indeed, the depth, beauty and importance of theory of locally compact groups, in particular representation theory, abstract harmonic analysis, du- ality theory and structure theory, are overwhelming, while the richness of links with other areas of mathematics, physics, chem- istry, computing and other sciences is hard to match. A natural question to ask is therefore: Mathematics Subject Classification: 22A05, 22A10, 54H20 Key words: Embeddings of topological groups, free topological groups, ‘massive’ topological groups, topological transformation groups. 422 Vladimir Pestov • Is there life beyond local compactness? In the present audience the question sounds hollow rhetoric as the answer is known to be in the affirmative to just about everyone.