A generalization of Gelfand-Naimark-Stone duality to completely regular spaces (Q2307611)

Gelfand-Naimark-Stone duality established a dual equivalence between the category \textbf{KHaus} of compact Hausdorff spaces and the category \textit{uba}\(\ell\) of uniformly complete bounded archimedean \(\ell\)-algebras. The present paper extends this duality to the category \textbf{CReg} of completely regular spaces. The authors introduce basic extensions of bounded archimedean \(\ell\)-algebras and generalize the Gelfand-Naimark-Stone duality to a dual equivalence between the category \textit{ubasic} of uniformly complete basic extensions and the category \textbf{Comp} of compactifications of completely regular spaces. Subsequently they discuss maximal basic extensions and show that the subcategory \textit{mbasic} of \textit{ubasic} consisting of maximal basic extensions is dually equivalent to the subcategory \textbf{SComp} of \textbf{Comp} consisting of Stone-Čech compactifications. In this way they derive the stated dual equivalence for completely regular spaces. The paper contains a lot of background information and ends with some illustrating applications.