Abstract. We solve a problem of Padmavally about resolvability of locally connected spaces, in the case where the space under consideration is regular.
IntroductionAs is well known, a space X is said to be resolvable (more generally, ν-resolvable for some cardinal ν ≥ 2) if it may be written as the union of two (respectively, ν-many) disjoint dense subspaces. The introduction of this property was essentially motivated by the discovery of crowded (i.e., without isolated points) topological spaces that fail to have it, even if this kind of space seems to be quite rare "in nature". As a matter of fact, many topological spaces with "reasonable" properties (such as, for example, locally compact spaces, or k-spaces-hence also metrizable, first-countable, sequential andČech-complete spaces) turn out to be resolvable, whenever they contain no isolated point. From this point of view, the notion of irresolvable space is to be considered, in the realm of crowded spaces, by the side of other stronger (and more "unnatural") topological properties, like maximality, submaximality, and the notions of nodec and door space (see [AC] for an overview).In this vein, it is natural to investigate if other well-known topological properties could imply resolvability. For example, the question of whether connectedness together with some suitable separation axiom implies non-submaximality (or nonmaximality, or resolvability) is implicitly raised by Hewitt in 1943, since Theorem 16 of [He] shows that for every infinite cardinal number ν there is a connected submaximal T 1 space of cardinality ν (actually, the argument given by Hewitt is needlessly complicated, because taking on any infinite set X a non-principal ultrafilter as a topology for it, makes X a connected maximal T 1 space). In [Pad, Theorem 2], Padmavally also proves that every Hausdorff submaximal space cannot be locally connected at any point, and in his reflections before such