Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Stone space
Summary
In topology and related areas of mathematics, a Stone space, also known as a profinite space or profinite set, is a compact totally disconnected Hausdorff space. Stone spaces are named after Marshall Harvey Stone who introduced and studied them in the 1930s in the course of his investigation of Boolean algebras, which culminated in his representation theorem for Boolean algebras.
The following conditions on the topological space are equivalent:
is a Stone space;
is homeomorphic to the projective limit (in the ) of an inverse system of finite discrete spaces;
is compact and totally separated;
is compact, T0 , and zero-dimensional (in the sense of the small inductive dimension);
is coherent and Hausdorff.
Important examples of Stone spaces include finite discrete spaces, the Cantor set and the space of -adic integers, where is any prime number. Generalizing these examples, any product of finite discrete spaces is a Stone space, and the topological space underlying any profinite group is a Stone space. The Stone–Čech compactification of the natural numbers with the discrete topology, or indeed of any discrete space, is a Stone space.
Stone's representation theorem for Boolean algebras
To every Boolean algebra we can associate a Stone space as follows: the elements of are the ultrafilters on and the topology on called , is generated by the sets of the form where
Stone's representation theorem for Boolean algebras states that every Boolean algebra is isomorphic to the Boolean algebra of clopen sets of the Stone space ; and furthermore, every Stone space is homeomorphic to the Stone space belonging to the Boolean algebra of clopen sets of These assignments are functorial, and we obtain a between the category of Boolean algebras (with homomorphisms as morphisms) and the category of Stone spaces (with continuous maps as morphisms).
Stone's theorem gave rise to a number of similar dualities, now collectively known as Stone dualities.
The category of Stone spaces with continuous maps is equivalent to the of the , which explains the term "profinite sets".
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.