Heitman dimension of distributive lattices and commutative rings

Abstract: This paper is the English translation of the first 4 sections of the article "Thierry Coquand, Henri Lombardi, and Claude Quitt\'e. Dimension de Heitmann des treillis distributifs et des anneaux commutatifs. Publications Math\'ematiques de l'Universit\'e de Franche-Comt\'e, Besan\c{c}on. Alg`ebre et th\'eorie des nombres. (2006)", after some corrections. Sections 5-7 of the original article are treated a bit more simply in the book "Henri Lombardi and Claude Quitt\'e. Commutative algebra: constructive methods. Finite projective modules. Algebra and applications, 20, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015." We study the notion of dimension introduced by Heitmann in his remarkable article "Raymond Heitmann. Generating non-Noetherian modules efficiently, Mich. Math. J., 31, (1084)" as well as a related notion, only implicit in his proofs. We first develop this within the general framework of the theory of distributive lattices and spectral spaces. Keywords: Constructive mathematics, distributive lattice, Heyting algebra, spectral space, Zariski lattice, Zariski spectrum, Krull dimension, maximal spectrum, Heitmann lattice, Heitmann spectrum, Heitmann dimensions. MSC: 13C15, 03F65, 13A15, 13E05