Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2009
Birkhoff and Pierce [2] introduced the concept of an ƒ-ring and showed that an l-ring is an f-ring if and only if it is a subdirect product of totallyordered rings. An l-ideal of an f-ring R is an algebraic ideal which is at the same time a lattice ideal of R. Structure spaces (i.e. sets of prime ideals endowed with the so-called hull-kernel or Stone topology) for ordinary rings have been studied by many authors. In this paper we consider certain analogues for ƒ-rings, and give characterisations of ƒ-rings for which these structure spaces are discrete.