In the realm of metric spaces the role of choice principles is investigated.
Notation and terminologyDefinition 1 (i) The countable axiom of choice CAC (Form 8 in [7]) is the assertion: For every set ¾ of non-empty disjoint sets there exists a set consisting of one and only one element from each element of . (ii) CAC ¬Ò (Form 10 in [7]) is CAC restricted to families of disjoint finite sets. (iii) CAC(Ê) (Form 94 in [7]) is CAC restricted to families of subsets of the real line Ê.(iv) The countable union theorem CUC (Form 31 in [7]) is the statement: The countable union of countable sets is countable.(v) Form 368 is the statement: The set Ê of all denumerable´countably infiniteµ subsets of Ê has size Ê .Definition 2 Let´ ̵ be a topological space.(i) is said to be Lindelöf iff every open cover Í of has a countable subcover Î.(ii) is said to be weakly Lindelöf iff every open cover Í has a countable subfamily Î such that Ë Î .(iii) has the ccc property iff every family of pairwise disjoint open subsets of is countable. (iv) A metric space´ µ is called preLindelöf iff for every ¼ space can be covered by countably many open discs of radius .(v) LMC stands for the proposition "Lindelöf metric spaces embed in compact metric spaces". In what follows we shall abbreviate "separable" by S, "second countable" by 2, "Lindelöf" by L, "weakly Lindelöf" by WL, "preLindelöf" by PL, "hereditarily Lindelöf" by "hL" and "hereditarily separable" by "hS". M(P, Q) stands for the statement: Every metric space´ µ which has the property P has also the property Q.