The Absolute of a Topological Space and its Application to Abelian l-groups

We give a axiomatic treatment of the absolute in the category of all topological spaces and characterize it as a cover with respect to the full subcategory of extremally disconnected spaces. As an application, we obtain the strongly projectable hull of an abelian l-group as a unique lifting of the absolute of its spectrum. Dedicated to B. V. M.