Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Mathematics / Diego Maldonado / Originally introduced in 1961 by Carl Gustav Axel Harnack [36] in the context of harmonic functions in R[superscript]2, the so-called Harnack inequality has since been established for solutions to a wide variety of different partial differential equations (PDEs) by mathematicians at different times of its historical development. Among them, Moser's iterative scheme [47-49] and Krylov-Safonov's probabilistic method [43, 44] stand out as pioneering theories, both in terms of their originality and their impact on the study of regularity of solutions to PDEs. Caffarelli's work [12] in 1989 greatly simplified Krylov-Safonov's theory and established Harnack's inequality in the context of fully non-linear elliptic PDEs. In this scenario, Caffarelli and Gutierrez's study of the linearized Monge-Ampere equation [15, 16] in 2002-2003 served as a motivation for axiomatizations of Krylov-Safonov-Caffarelli theory [3, 25, 57]. The main work in this dissertation is a new axiomatization of Krylov-Safonov-Caffarelli theory. Our axiomatic approach to Harnack's inequality in spaces of homogeneous type has some distinctive features. It sheds more light onto the role of the so-called critical density property, a property which is at the heart of the techniques developed by Krylov and Safonov. Our structural assumptions become more natural, and thus, our theory better suited, in the context of variational PDEs. We base our method on the theory of Muckenhoupt's A[subscript]p weights. The dissertation also gives an application of our axiomatic approach to Harnack's inequality in the context of infinite graphs. We provide an alternate proof of Harnack's inequality for harmonic functions on graphs originally proved in [21].

We study variants of P-frames and associated rings, which can be viewed as natural generalizations of the classical variants of P-spaces and associated rings. To be more precise, we de ne quasi m-rings to be those rings in which every prime d-ideal is either maximal or minimal. For a completely regular frame L, if the ring RL of real-valued continuous functions of L is a quasi m-ring, we say L is a quasi cozero complemented frame. These frames are less restricted than the cozero complemented frames. Using these frames we study some properties of what are called quasi m-spaces, and observe that the property of being a quasi m-space is inherited by cozero subspaces, dense z- embedded subspaces, and regular-closed subspaces among normal quasi m-space. M. Henriksen, J. Mart nez and R. G. Woods have de ned a Tychono space X to be a quasi P-space in case every prime z-ideal of C(X) is either minimal or maximal. We call a point I of L a quasi P-point if every prime z-ideal of RL contained in the maximal ideal associated with I is either maximal or minimal. If all points of L are quasi P-points, we say L is a quasi P-frame. This is a conservative de nition in the sense that X is a quasi P-space if and only if the frame OX is a quasi P-frame. We characterize these frames in terms of cozero elements, and, among cozero complemented frames, give a su cient condition for a frame to be a quasi P-frame. A Tychono space X is called a weak almost P-space if for every two zero-sets E and F of X with IntE IntF, there is a nowhere dense zero-set H of X such that E F [H. We present the pointfree version of weakly almost P-spaces. We de ne weakly regular rings by a condition characterizing the rings C(X) for weak almost P-spaces X. We show that a reduced f-ring is weakly regular if and only if every prime z-ideal in it which contains only zero-divisors is a d-ideal. We characterize the frames L for which the ring RL of real-valued continuous functions on L is weakly regular. We introduce the notions of boundary frames and boundary rings, and use them to give another ring-theoretic characterization of boundary spaces. We show that X is a boundary space if and only if C(X) is a boundary ring. A Tychono space whose Stone- Cech compacti cation is a nite union of closed subspaces each of which is an F-space is said to be nitely an F-space. Among normal spaces, S. Larson gave a characterization of these spaces in terms of properties of function rings C(X). By extending this notion to frames, we show that the normality restriction can actually be dropped, even in spaces, and thus we sharpen Larson's result. / Mathematics / D. Phil. (Mathematics)