On a characterization of path connected topological fields

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to give a characterization of path connected topological fields, inspired by the classical Gelfand correspondence between a compact Hausdorff topological space $X$ and the space of maximal ideals of the ring of real valued continuous functions $C(X,\mathbb{R})$. More explicitly, our motivation is the following question: What is the essential property of the topological field $F=\mathbb{R}$ that makes such a correspondence valid for all compact Hausdorff spaces? It turns out that such a perfect correspondence exists if and only if $F$ is a path connected topological field.