A new approach to the Kat\v{e}tov-Tong theorem

We give a new proof of the Kat\v{e}tov-Tong theorem. Our strategy is to first prove the theorem for compact Hausdorff spaces, and then extend it to all normal spaces. The key ingredient is how the ring of bounded continuous real-valued functions embeds in the ring of all bounded real-valued functions. In the compact case this embedding can be described by an appropriate statement, which we prove implies both the Kat\v{e}tov-Tong theorem and a version of the Stone-Weierstrass theorem. We then extend the Kat\v{e}tov-Tong theorem to all normal spaces by showing how to extend upper and lower semicontinuous real-valued functions to the Stone-\v Cech compactification so that the less than or equal relation between the functions is preserved.