Distributors and Wallmanufacture (Q805643)

The author observes that most lattice-oriented work prior to 1936 was concerned with algebraic aspects of lattices, while in the thirties, Henry Wallman, Garrett Birkhoff, and A. H. Stone established the relevance of lattice theory for topological investigations. In 1963, \textit{B. Banaschewski} [Math. Nachr. 27, 105-114 (1963; Zbl 0113.377)] presented a unified theory of ``Wallman-type'' compactifications. More recently, \textit{B. Banaschewski} and \textit{R. Harting} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., III. Ser. 50, 385-404 (1985; Zbl 0569.16003)] studied the lattice- theoretical aspects of radicals in rings and their relationships to the old theme of Wallman compactifications. Their central theme is that of a Wallman locale, that is, a complete lattice with a compact unit u, satisfying the infinite join-distributive law and having the join- disjunction property, that is, \(a\nleq b\) implies \(a\vee c=u\) and \(b\vee c\neq u\) for some c. In the words of the author, ``the main aim of this note is to demonstrate that this disjunction property occurs as an important tool in quite diverse parts of algebra and topology, and second, to show that many more or less known algebraic factorization processes, leading to structures with the disjunction property, are merely special instances of one general topological construction, namely the so-called \(T_ 0\)- reflection''. The \(T_ 0\)-reflections of this work arise from monoids or binoids.