De Vries powers: a generalization of Boolean powers for compact Hausdorff spaces. (Q2349937)

In recent years de Vries algebras have received a great deal of attention from point-free practitioners and authors who use point-free techniques in their work. In this paper the familiar Boolean power construction is generalised to the setting of compact Hausdorff spaces by replacing Boolean algebras with de Vries algebras, and Stone duality with de Vries duality. Towards this end, the authors introduce the concept of a finitely valued function with domain a compact Hausdorff space and codomain a totally ordered algebra, and show how the operations of the algebra lift to the set of all finitely valued normal functions. This set has a canonical proximity relation; and that is how the de Vries power construction is arrived at. When restricted to Stone spaces, it gives the Boolean power construction. In the latter part of the paper the authors take a totally ordered integral domain \(A\) and show that its de Vries powers can be axiomatised as proximity Baer Specker \(A\)-algebras. This leads to the introduction of the category of proximity Baer Specker \(A\)-algebras and proximity morphisms between them, which the authors prove to be dually equivalent to the category of compact Hausdorff spaces and continuous maps. This provides an analogue of de Vries duality for proximity Baer Specker \(A\)-algebras. The paper is long and well written, with a lot of deep results that cannot all be included in a brief review.