Pr\"ufer's Ideal Numbers as Gelfand's maximal Ideals

Abstract

Polyadic arithmetics is a branch of mathematics related to $p$--adic theory. The aim of the present paper is to show that there are very close relations between polyadic arithmetics and the classic theory of commutative Banach algebras. Namely, let $\ms A$ be the algebra consisting of all complex periodic functions on $\Z$ with the uniform norm. Then the polyadic topological ring can be defined as the ring of all characters $\ms A\to\C$ with convolution operations and the Gelfand topology.