Abstract

If there is a homeomorphic embedding of one set into another, the sets are said to be topologically comparable. Friedman and Hirst have shown that the topological comparability of countable closed subsets of the reals is equivalent to the subsystem of second order arithmetic denoted byATR 0. Here, this result is extended to countable closed locally compact subsets of arbitrary complete separable metric spaces. The extension uses an analogue of the one point compactification of ℝ