Some of Melvin Henriksen's contributions to spaces of ideals (Q639697)

This is an unusual and interesting paper reporting on some results in the space of closed prime ideals in a \(C^*\)-algebra, but also telling a story of the making of mathematics. Each of the three authors narrates how each in different settings over decades came to become engaged in Melvin Henriksen's work: Mack in the equivalence of rings, lattices and semigroups generated by topological spaces; Kopperman in a quasimetric giving rise to the hull-kernel topology on the space of prime ideals of a communicative ring with identity; Somerset in the patch and hull-kernel topologies in the space of prime ideals of \(C(X)\). This evolved into a 1997 paper, jointly with \textit{M. Henriksen} [``Joincompact spaces, continuous lattices and \(C^*\)-algebras'', Algebra Univers. 38, No. 3, 289--323 (1997; Zbl 0933.54002)] that draws together ideas from four different areas of mathematics: (1) Nachbin's compact ordered spaces, (2) bitopological spaces (joincompact and continuity spaces), (3) continuous lattices and continuous posets, (4) representation of \(C^*\)-algebras. The glue for these disparate concepts is that each structure is embeddable, within an appropriate category, into a product of the interval \([0,1]\). References and genesis of the connections are given in this paper. After the paper (this is also the title of a section in the paper), Mack has used the schemes developed in [loc. cit.] to obtain results in \(C^*\)-algebras; Kopperman the bitopological view to answer some questions in topological spaces; Somerset an interest in minimal prime ideals to work in \(C^*\)-algebras and Banach algebras, as well as in bitopological and joincompact spaces. Each continues to work in different contexts with his colleagues in his area in functional analysis, topology, or algebra. Thus [loc. cit.] continues to generate investigations. What a wonderful tribute to Mel Henriksen! In a mathematics education session of the American Mathematical Society in January 2009, Henriksen talked about his collaborations with mathematicians in third world countries. In the words of one of the authors: ``\dots we learned that Mel was seeking to erase artificial boundaries between related parts of mathematics. It is this cutting across boundaries and melding of ideas that was the hallmark of Mel's life and career.''