Totally disconnected compactifications (Q688998)

A topological space is called totally disconnected provided that any two different points can be separated by a clopen set. For a topological space \(X\) let \({\mathcal L}(X)\) denote the Boolean ring of clopen subsets of \(X\). In the paper under review there is shown that every totally disconnected compactification \(Y\) of \(X\) is uniquely determined by a subring \(L\) of \({\mathcal L}(X)\) in such a way that \(L\) is a base in \(X\) and is isomorphic to \({\mathcal L}(Y)\). The result illustrates an analogy between the Stone duality and Gelfand's theory on the correspondence of compactifications to rings of continuous functions.