Category Archives: ring-theory

## A short survey of von Neumann regular rings

I've talked a lot about von Neumann regular rings on this blog, so I thought I'd write an informal short survey on them, collecting some facts we've already seen and many new ones. It should give you an idea of what von Neumann regular rings are. Most of the facts that I did not explicitly […]

## Roger Ming's theorem on von Neumann regular rings

We say that an associative ring $A$ is von Neumann regular if for every $a\in A$ there exists a $x\in A$ such that $axa = a$. That is a rather strange condition, isn't it? But, you can think of $x$ as a pseudoinverse to $a$. This weakening of inverses has a homological counterpart: if every […]

## Exotic dimensions used in ring theory

Do you ever get the feeling that mathematics uses the word dimension a lot? Well, that's for good reason. The concept of dimension is fundamental in mathematics. What is dimension? You can think of dimension as a numerical invariant characterizing the number of parameters required to do a certain thing. For example, for vector spaces, […]

## Axiomatizability of classes of structures

Let's talk about axiomatizability in first-order logic, with examples in ring theory. Let's call a class $\Ccl$ of rings axiomatizable if there exists a set $T$ of first order sentences such that $C\in\Ccl$ if and only if $C$ is a model of $T$ (that is, satisfies every sentence in $T$.) What are some examples? The […]

## Abelian categories: examples and nonexamples

I've been talking a little about abelian categories these days. That's because I've been going over Weibel's An Introduction to Homological Algebra. It's a book I read before, and I still feel pretty confident about the material. This time, though, I think I'm going to explore a few different paths that I haven't really given […]

## Working with group rings in Sage

Let $\Z[\Z/n]$ denote the integral group ring of the cyclic group $\Z/n$. How would you create $\Z[\Z/n]$ in Sage so that you could easily multiply elements? First, if you've already assigned a group to the variable 'A', then

will give you the corresponding group ring and store it in the variable 'R'. The first […]

## Strong Nilpotence and the Jacobson Radical

In the previous post we saw the following definition for a ring $R$: An element $r\in R$ is called strongly nilpotent if every sequence $r = r_0,r_1,r_2,\dots$ such that $r_{n+1}\in r_nRr_n$ is eventually zero. Why introduce this notion? Well, did you know that every finite integral domain is a field? If $R$ is an integral […]

## Nilpotent and Strongly Nilpotent

Let $R$ be an associative ring. An element $r\in R$ is called nilpotent if $r^n = 0$ for some $n$. There is a stronger notion: an element $r\in R$ is called strongly nilpotent if every sequence $r = r_0,r_1,r_2,\dots$ such that $r_{n+1}\in r_nRr_n$ is eventually zero. How are these two related? It is always the […]