One of the simplest and yet most fruitful ideas in forcing was the notion of Karel Prikry in which he used a measure on a cardinal κ to change the cofinality of κ to ω without collapsing it. The idea has found connections to almost every branch of modern set theory, from large cardinals to small, from combinatorics to models, from Choice to Determinacy, and from consistency to inconsistency. The long list of generalizers and modifiers includes Apter, Gitik, Henle, Spector, Shelah, Mathias, Magidor, Radin, Blass and Kimchi.

This paper is about generalizing Prikry forcing and partition properties to “simple spaces”. The concept of a simple space is itself the generalization of those combinatorial objects upon which the notions of “measurable”, “compact”, “supercompact”, “huge”, etc. are based. Simple spaces were introduced in [ADHZ1] and [ADHZ2] together with a broader generalization, “filter spaces”. The definition provided here is a small simplification of earlier versions. The author is indebted to Mitchell Spector, whose careful reading turned up numerous errors, some subtle, some flagrant.

In this first section, we review simple spaces briefly, including a short introduction to the space Qκλ. In §2, we describe our generalizations of partition property and Prikry forcing, and discuss the relationship between them. In §3, we find a partition property for the huge space [λ]κ, but show that Prikry forcing here is impossible. We find partition properties for Qκλ and show that Prikry forcing can be done here.