Serial Rings, 2001

The main theme in classical ring theory is the structure theory of rings of a particular kind. For example, no one text book in ring theory could miss the Wedderburn-Artin theorem, which says that a ring R is semisimple Artinian iffR is isomorphic to a finite direct sum of full matrix rings over skew fields. This is an example of a finiteness condition which, at least historically, has dominated in ring theory. Ifwe would like to consider a requirement of a lattice-theoretical type, other than being Artinian or Noetherian, the most natural is uni-seriality. Here a module M is called uni-serial if its lattice of submodules is a chain, and a ring R is uni-serial if both RR and RR are uni-serial modules. The class of uni-serial rings includes commutative valuation rings and closed under homomorphic images. But it is not closed under direct sums nor with respect to Morita equivalence: a matrix ring over a uni-serial ring is not uni-serial. There is a class of rings which is very close to uni-serial but closed under the constructions just mentioned: serial rings. A ring R is called serial if RR and RR is a direct sum (necessarily finite) of uni-serial modules. Amongst others this class includes triangular matrix rings over a skew field. Also if F is a finite field of characteristic p and G is a finite group with a cyclic normal p-Sylow subgroup, then the group ring FG is serial.

Introduction. 1. Basic Notions. 2. Finitely Presented Modules over Serial Rings. 3. Prime Ideals in Serial Rings. 4. Classical Localizations in Serial Rings. 5. Serial Rings with the A.C.C. on annihilators and Nonsingular Serial Rings. 6. Serial Prime Goldie Rings. 7. Noetherian Serial Rings. 8. Artinian Serial Rings. 9. Serial Rings with Krull Dimension. 10. Model Theory for Modules. 11. Indecomposable Pure Injective Modules over Serial Rings. 12. Super-Decomposable Pure Injective Modules over Commutative Valuation Rings. 13. Pure Injective Modules over Commutative Valuation Domains. 14. Pure Projective Modules over Nearly Simple Uniserial Domains. 15. Pure Projective Modules over Exceptional Uniserial Rings. 16. Sigma-Pure Injective Modules over Serial Rings. 17. Endomorphism Rings of Artinian Modules. Bibliography. Notations. Index.