Spaces of ideals of distributive lattices ii. minimal prime ideals

Abstract

This paper, the second of a sequence beginning with [14], deals with the relationship between a distributive lattice L = (L; ∨, ∧, 0) with zero, and certain spaces of minimal prime ideals of L. Similar studies of minimal prime ideals in commutative semigroups [8] and in commutative rings [6] inspired this work, and many of our results are similar to ones in these two articles. However the nature of our situation enables many of these results to be pushed deeper and thus to arrive at a more satisfactory state; indeed with the insight obtained from the simpler lattice situation, one can return to some topics considered in [6], [8] and give complete accounts. We do not do this in the present pa..