Extremally disconnected spaces, subspaces and retracts

AbstractA characterization of compact subspaces of extremally disconnected spaces is given which is similar to Gleason's characterization that the extremally disconnected spaces are projective for the class of compact spaces. An equivalence is established between the questions of whether every basically disconnected space is embeddable into an extremally disconnected space and the Borel lifting problems for the category algebras of generalized Cantor cubes. We study an inductive method of strengthening the product topology on the Cantor cubes to extremally disconnected topologies and use this to establish, from CH, that every compact F-space of weight c+ embeds into an extremally disconnected space