Quiz your maths: do the uniformly continuous functions on the line form a ring?

Abstract

The paper deals with the interplay between boundedness, order and ring structures in function lattices on the line and related metric spaces. It is shown that the lattice of all Lipschitz functions on a normed space $E$ is isomorphic to its sublattice of bounded functions if and only if $E$ has dimension one. The lattice of Lipschitz functions on $E$ carries a "hidden" $f$-ring structure with a unit, and the same happens to the (larger) lattice of all uniformly continuous functions for a wide variety of metric spaces. An example of a metric space whose lattice of uniformly continuous functions supports no unital $f$-ring structure is provided.