About Stone's notion of spectrum (Q1772250): Difference between revisions

The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a constructive viewpoint, Marshall Stone's `General Theory of Spectra', in which he established representation theorems for (suitable) ordered rings as rings of functions on compact Hausdorff spaces. In the constructive setting, the compact spaces become locales, and the key ingredients of the representations reduce to elementary algebraic facts about ordered signs -- all of which can be, and are here, proved constructively. The author sees this as a vindication of `the insight of Riesz and Stone that some basic results in functional analysis can be captured by simple algebraic statements'. Although generally well written, the paper suffers from poor proof-reading: some notations are used before they are defined, and on p.~144 the phrase `least upper bound' is twice used where `greatest lower bound' is meant. Further confusion may be caused by the fact that the author uses the term `preorder' where most people would say `partial order'. But readers should not be deterred by these minor matters: the paper is well worth the effort required to read it.