Rings Of Quotients

The theory of rings of quotients has its origin in the work of (j). Ore and K. Asano on the construction of the total ring of fractions, in the 1930's and 40's. But the subject did not really develop until the end of the 1950's, when a number of important papers appeared (by R. E. Johnson, Y. Utumi, A. W. Goldie, P. Gabriel, J. Lambek, and others). Since then the progress has been rapid, and the subject has by now attained a stage of maturity, where it is possible to make a systematic account of it (which is the purpose of this book). The most immediate example of a ring of quotients is the field of fractions Q of a commutative integral domain A. It may be characterized by the two properties: (i) For every qEQ there exists a non-zero SEA such that qSEA. (ii) Q is the maximal over-ring of A satisfying condition (i). The well-known construction of Q can be immediately extended to the case when A is an arbitrary commutative ring and S is a multiplicatively closed set of non-zero-divisors of A. In that case one defines the ring of fractions Q = A [S-l] as consisting of pairs (a, s) with aEA and SES, with the declaration that (a, s)=(b, t) if there exists UES such that uta = usb. The resulting ring Q satisfies (i), with the extra requirement that SES, and (ii).

This new book can be read independently from the first volume and may be used for lecturing, seminar- and self-study, or for general reference. It focuses more on specific topics in order to introduce readers to a wealth of basic and useful ideas without the hindrance of heavy machinery or undue abstractions. User-friendly with its abundance of examples illustrating the theory at virtually every step, the volume contains a large number of carefully chosen exercises to provide newcomers with practice, while offering a rich additional source of information to experts. A direct approach is used in order to present the material in an efficient and economic way, thereby introducing readers to a considerable amount of interesting ring theory without being dragged through endless preparatory material.

This volume offers a compendium of exercises of varying degree of difficulty in the theory of modules and rings. It is the companion volume to GTM 189. All exercises are solved in full detail. Each section begins with an introduction giving the general background and the theoretical basis for the problems that follow.

This volume consists of refereed research and expository articles by both plenary and other speakers at the International Conference on Algebra and Applications held at Ohio University in June 2008, to honor S.K. Jain on his 70th birthday. The articles are on a wide variety of areas in classical ring theory and module theory, such as rings satisfying polynomial identities, rings of quotients, group rings, homological algebra, injectivity and its generalizations, etc. Included are also applications of ring theory to problems in coding theory and in linear algebra.

First published in 1982. These lectures are in two parts. Part I, entitled injective Modules Over Levitzki Rings, studies an injective module E and chain conditions on the set A^(E,R) of right ideals annihilated by subsets of E. Part II is on the subject of (F)PF, or (finitely) pseudo-Frobenius, rings [i.e., all (finitely generated) faithful modules generate the category mod-R of all R-modules]. (The PF rings had been introduced by Azumaya as a generalization of quasi-Frobenius rings, but FPF includes infinite products of Prufer domains, e.g., Z w .)