Positive definite functions over regular f-rings and representations as sums of squares (Q581656)

Sheaf representations are very useful in providing information about the ring being represented. In particular, topos theoretic methods utilizing the intuitionistic logic of sheaf toposes are a powerful tool. For example, if R is a regular ring, then its Pierce representation may be viewed as a field in Sh(X), X being the Pierce spectrum of R. The Pierce spectrum is a Stone space (compact, Hausdorff, totally disconnected) and in this case the global sections functor not only preserves limits, but also image factorizations. This allows to transfer many properties of the sheaf of rings to its ring of global sections (i.e. the original ring R). For an excellent discussion of these ideas, see Chapter 5 of \textit{P. T. Johnstone}'s book, Stone spaces (1982; Zbl 0499.54001)]. In two earlier papers [On the intuitionistic validity of Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, Artin's theorem and related results, J. Symb. Logic 53, 1177-1187 (1988; Zbl 0669.18003); Hilbert's Nullstellensatz revisited, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 54, 287-297 (1988; Zbl 0666.18004)], the author used formally intuitionistic and infinitary logic and the sheaf methods discussed above to provide new proofs of some classical ring theoretic results. The paper under review furthers these investigations by proving a number of results concerning regular f-rings and positive definite functions over such rings (among these results is a proof of the Artin- Schreier theorem for regular f-rings).