We give several characteristic properties of FAC spaces, namely topological spaces with no infinite discrete subspace. The first one was obtained in 2019 by the first author, and states that every closed set is a finite union of irreducible closed subsets. The full result extends well-known characterizations of posets with no infinite antichain. One of them is that FAC spaces are, equivalently, topological spaces in which every closed set contains a dense Noetherian subspace, or spaces in which every Hausdorff subspace is finite, or in which no subspace has any infinite relatively Hausdorff subset. The latter comes with a nice min-max property, extending an observation of Erdös and Tarski in the case of posets: on spaces with no infinite relatively Hausdorff subset, the cardinalities of relatively Hausdorff subsets are bounded, and the least upper bound is also the least cardinality of a family of closed irreducible subsets that cover the space.

16 pages, 1 figure. Additional equivalent conditions given in Theorem 14 and Proposition 13, some new comments on A.H. Stone's work. Mistake in the statement of Theorem 14 (xi) corrected. A few additional explanations given and some clarifications made