Rings of quotients of C(X) induced by points

We study two rings of quotients of C(X), the ring of continuous functions on the Tychonoff space X. The first, F(X), is the ring of quotients induced by the filter of ideals consisting of dense finite intersections of fixed maximal ideals. The second, CF], is the ring of quotients induced by the filter of dense cofinite subspaces of X. After some preliminary information we explicitly describe in §2 and §3 the constructions of these rings of quotients. In the third section, we use F(X)and CF] to define and study the class of h-points and h-spaces. In particular, we show that C-spaces and P-spaces are h-spaces. In the last section we construct an ideal of C(X)which will be used to give an ideal theoretic characterization of h-points. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.