Topological groups: where to from here?

Abstract

This is an account of one man's view of the current perspective of theory of topological groups. We survey some recent developments which are, from our viewpoint, indicative of the future directions, concentrating on actions of topological groups on compacta, embeddings of topological groups, free topological groups, and `massive' groups (such as groups of homeomorphisms of compacta and groups of isometries of various metric spaces).