Compactness of the associated (Stone) space of an infinite Boolean Algebra.

boolean-algebracompactnessfiltersgeneral-topology

I am trying to expand my intuition of Boolean algebras and Stone's representation theorem. In particular I am trying to understand why the associated (Stone) space of a Boolean algebra is always Compact (It is also Hausdorff and Totally Disconnected). For clarity, I want to investigate the special case of a simple infinite Boolean Algebra and identify the apparent flaw in my line of reasoning. (Further generalizations and comments are welcome)

Let $B = \mathcal{P}(\omega)$ be the boolean algebra ordered by inclusion.

Let also $S(B)$ be the set of all utrafilters on $B$.

My understanding is that in our case this would mean that: $S(B) = \lbrace F_i \subseteq \mathcal{P}(\omega) \vert i \in \omega\rbrace$ where each $F_i$ is the principal ultrafilter on $B$ with $\lbrace i \rbrace$ being its minimal element.

We can induce a topology on $S(B)$ generated by the (basic open) sets $U_b=\lbrace F \in S(B) \vert b \in F \rbrace$

It seems to then follow that $U_{\lbrace i \rbrace} = F_i$ (for all $i \in \omega$) which would mean that all singletons of $S(B)$ are open.

But if that were the case, we simply have that $S(B)$ admits the dicrete topology on an infinite set, and thus it could not be Compact. This would seem to violate the fact that $S(B)$ should always be a Compact, Totally Disconnected, Hausdorff (Stone) space.

What am I missing?

UPDATE: It seems that I was missing quite a few ultrafilters in my calculation of $S(B)$. It was not particularly obvious to me as to why there should be any more than just the "obvious" principal ultrafilters. A step in the right direction (at least for me) was to realize that, informally speaking, every ultafilter contains "half" of the elements of the boolean algebra $B$. More formally, for every $b \in B$ and $F \in S(B)$ we have that either $b \in F$ or $\omega \setminus b \in F$ (which immediately means that the basic sets $U_b$ are also closed). The next – far from trivial – step is to observe that one can find several such "dichotomies" which form filters. As a matter of fact, the number of "filter-dichotomies" equals the number of the dichotomies themselves which is rather interesting.

Best Answer

$S(B)$ contains all countably many fixed ultrafilters $\mathcal{U}_n=\{A \subseteq \omega: n \in A\}$ (for any fixed $n \in \omega$)(also called "principal ultrafilters") but many many more ($2^{2^{\aleph_0}}$ many!) non-fixed, free ultrafilters, that have empty intersection, and no common point. These are hard to imagine (you cannot give a constructive example of one) but Zorn's lemma implies that they exist. The fixed ultrafilters as a subspace of $S(B)$ form a countable discrete set. The Stone space is homeomorphic to what topologists call the Cech-Stone (or Stone-Cech) compactification (see Wikipedia e.g.) of the integers and the fixed ultrafilters "are" in that compactfication the original integers. The other ultrafilters are the compactifying points we add.

So your picture is incomplete. K.P. has a nice intro to Stone duality here, as an extra resource.