Duality and canonical extensions for stably compact spaces (Q649839)

In this paper, it is shown that the theory of canonical extensions can be extended to proximity lattices. (Strong) proximity lattices abstract the finitary part of the notion of an arithmetic lattice and were introduced by \textit{A. Jung} and \textit{P. Sünderhauf} [Papers on general topology and applications. Papers presented at the 11th summer conference at the University of Southern Maine, Gorham, ME, USA, August 10--13, 1995. New York, NY: The New York Academy of Sciences. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 806, 214--230 (1996; Zbl 0885.54001)] who proved that they are dual to stably compact spaces. In Section 1, the author revisits the Jung and Sünderhauf duality: by weakening the axioms for strong proximity lattices he makes more apparent how the inherent self-duality of stably compact spaces is reflected in the representing algebraic structures. Then, in Section 2, he shows the existence and uniqueness of canonical extensions for proximity lattices (satisfying one additional strongness condition). The canonical extension gives an algebraic point-free description of the saturated sets of a stably compact space, starting from any basis presentation of the space, without using the Axiom of Choice. Finally, in Section 3, he puts the duality of Jung and Sünderhauf in a categorical perspective. Specifically, he shows that the duality can be obtained as an application of a general categorical construction (splitting by idempotents) to a well-known correspondence between continuous functions on spectral spaces and certain relations on the associated distributive lattice.