This paper consists in the formulation of a novel categorical set theory, MLCat, which is proved to be equiconsistent to New Foundations (NF), and which can be modulated to correspond to intuitionistic (denoted with an “I” on the left) or classical NF, with atoms (denoted with a “U” on the right) or not:

We compare two influential ways of defining a generalized notion of space. The first, inspired by Gelfand duality, states that the category of ‘noncommutative spaces’ is the opposite of the category of C*-algebras. The second, loosely generalizing Stone duality, maintains that the category of ‘point-free spaces’ is the opposite of the category of frames (that is, complete lattices in which the meet distributes over arbitrary joins). Earlier work by the first three authors shows how a noncommutative C*-algebra gives rise to a commutative one internal to a certain sheaf topos. The latter, then, has a constructive Gelfand spectrum, also internal to the topos in question. After a brief review of this work, we compute the so-called external description of this internal spectrum, which in principle is a fibred point-free space in the familiar topos of sets and functions. However, we obtain the external spectrum as a fibred topological space in the usual sense. This leads to an explicit Gelfand transform, as well as to a topological reinterpretation of the Kochen–Specker theorem of quantum mechanics.

F. Richman raised the question of whether the following principle of second order arithmetic is valid in intuitionistic higher order arithmetic HAH:

and if not, whether assuming Church's Thesis CT and Markov's Principle MP would help. Blass and Scedrov gave models of HAH in which this principle, which we call RP, is not valid, but their models do not satisfy either CT or MP.

In this paper a realizability topos Lif is constructed in which CT and MP hold, but RP is false. (It is shown, however, that RP is derivable in HAH + CT + MP + ECT0, so RP holds in the effective topos.) Lif is a generalization of a realizability notion invented by V. Lifschitz. Furthermore, Lif is a subtopos of the effective topos.