Chris J. Isham, Jeremy Butterfield (1998), International Journal of Theoretical Physics 37(11):2669–2733 — DOI-10.1023/A:1026680806775
Standing in the record
Registered on 2026-09-29 at the owner’s request, because the owner’s prior-art novelty map (a private working document on concepts as projectors, the linear representation hypothesis and their neighbours) cites it: §0 and row 8: founding paper of the topos/spectral-presheaf program the map says owns §2.1 (no global ultrafilter → presheaf over contexts → Kochen–Specker). It is seeded from metadata and published descriptions and has not been read here.
Identification notes: Series not registered — say so: II (Categorical preliminaries, IJTP 38, 1999, quant-ph/9808067), III (Von Neumann algebras as the base category, IJTP 39, 2000, quant-ph/9911020), IV (Interval valuations, IJTP 41, 2002, quant-ph/0107123). Arxiv ids of II–IV from memory, not verified. Corrected 2026-10-01: the sequels are now registered and read: II is LIT-381 (Butterfield & Isham, “Conceptual Aspects, and Classical Analogues” — not “Categorical preliminaries” as written above, and with Butterfield first), III is LIT-380 (Hamilton, Isham & Butterfield), and IV is LIT-382 (Butterfield & Isham, “Interval Valuations”).
It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-271 is the close reading of 2026-09-29, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the founding paper of the topos approach to quantum theory and the origin of “Kochen–Specker = no global section of a presheaf over contexts”, credited as such by Abramsky & Brandenburger (LIT-016). The reformulation itself is definitional and its proof is two paragraphs. The paper’s own contribution is the sieve-valued generalized valuation, whose later development (von Neumann algebras as base, daseinisation) lives in Parts III–IV and in Döring–Isham (LIT-343, LIT-335, LIT-299, LIT-310).