AMERICANS are taught that the English Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774. Scandinavians are taught that the Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele generated oxygen in Uppsala in 1771–2, several years before Priestley. Scheele claimed that he wrote Lavoisier, describing the experiments in September, 1774. However, Lavoisier denied seeing or receiving his letter. Among...

We introduce generalized Priestley quasi-orders and show that subalgebras of bounded distributive meet-semilattices are dually characterized by means of generalized Priestley quasi-orders. This generalizes the well-known characterization of subalgebras of bounded distributive lattices by means of Priestley quasiorders (Adams, Algebra Univers 3:216–228, 1973; Cignoli et al., Order 8(3):299– 315,...

We prove that the category of left-handed skew distributive lattices with zero and proper homomorphisms is dually equivalent to a category of sheaves over local Priestley spaces. Our result thus provides a noncommutative version of classical Priestley duality for distributive lattices. The result also generalizes the recent development of Stone duality for skew Boolean algebras.