All spaces of countable spread can be small

Abstract

The main result of this paper is the proof of the simultaneous consistency, modulo a weakly compact cardinal, of the equality $2^{< \mathfrak{c}} = \mathfrak{c}$ with the following property (*) of partitions of pairs of $\mathfrak{c}$: \smallskip (*) For any coloring (or partition) $k : [\mathfrak{c}]^2 \rightarrow 2$ either there is a homogeneous set of size $\mathfrak{c}$ in color $0$ or there is a set $S \in [\mathfrak{c}]^\mathfrak{c}$ such that for every countable $A \subset S$ there is $\beta \in \mathfrak{c}$ for which $A \subset \beta$ and $k(\{\alpha, \beta\}) = 1$ for all $\alpha \in A$. \smallskip (*) plus $2^{< \mathfrak{c}} = \mathfrak{c}$ together then imply that for every topological space $X$ of countable spread, i.e. not containing any uncountable discrete subset, $|X| \le \mathfrak{c}$ if it is Hausdorff and $o(X) = \mathfrak c$ if it is also infinite and regular. Here $o(X)$ denotes the number of all open subsets of $X$.