A New Approach to the Katětov–Tong Theorem

Abstract

We give a new proof of the Katětov–Tong theorem. Our strategy is to first prove the theorem for compact Hausdorff spaces, and then extend it to all normal spaces by showing how to extend upper and lower semicontinuous real-valued functions to the Stone–Čech compactification so that the less than or equal relation between the functions is preserved. In this way, the main step of the proof is the compact case, and our approach to handling this case also leads to a new proof of a version of the Stone–Weierstrass theorem.