%0 Journal Article %A Fernando Galván, José Francisco %A Gamboa Mutuberria, José Manuel %T On the semialgebraic Stone-Čech compactification of a semialgebraic set %D 2012 %@ 1088-6850 %U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/42296 %X In the same vein as the classical Stone–ˇCech compactification, we prove in this work that the maximal spectra of the rings of semialgebraic and bounded semialgebraic functions on a semialgebraic set M ⊂ Rn, which are homeomorphic topological spaces, provide the smallest Hausdorff compactification of M such that each bounded R-valued semialgebraic function on M extends continuously to it. Such compactification β∗sM, which can be characterized as the smallest compactification that dominates all semialgebraic compactifications of M, is called the semialgebraic Stone– ˇ Cech compactification of M, although it is very rarely a semialgebraic set. We are also interested in determining the main topological properties of the remainder ∂M = β∗sM \M and we prove that it has finitely many connected components and that this number equals the number of connected components of the remainder of a suitable semialgebraic compactification of M. Moreover, ∂M is locally connected and its local compactness can be characterized just in terms of the topology of M. %~