Dynamics and structure of groups of homeomorphisms of scattered spaces

Abstract

We study the topological structure and the topological dynamics of groups of homeomorphisms of scattered spaces. For a large class of them (including the homeomorphism group of any ordinal space or of any locally compact scattered space), we establish Roelcke-precompactness and amenability, classify all closed normal subgroups and compute the universal minimal flow. As a by-product, we classify up to isomorphism the homeomorphism groups of compact ordinal spaces.