Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Given a suitable regular ring R, we construct a sheaf-like representation for R as a ring of continuous sections from a completely regular space to an appropriately toplogized disjoint union of factor rings corresponding to ‘'extremal“ pseudo-rank functions. Applied to rings which are complete with respect to a rank function this representation is an isomorphism, the completely regular space is extremally disconnected and compact, and the * ‘stalks” are the simple factor rings.