JOURNAL OF ALGEBRA 198, 412]427Ž. 1997 ARTICLE JA977145 The Real Spectrum of a Noncommutative Ring Ka Hin LeungU National Uni¨ersity of Singapore, 119260, Singapore View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE and provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Murray Marshall² and Yufei Zhang³ Uni¨ersity of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5E6, Canada Communicated by Susan Montgomery Received September 30, 1996 Spaces of orderings were introduced by the second author in a series of paperswx 15]19 and various structure results were obtained generalizing results proved earlier for formally real fields by various people: E. Becker, L. Brocker,È R. Brown, T. Craven, A. Prestel, and N. Schwartz. Inwx 6, 26 Žalso seewx 20, 23, 25. Craven and Tschimmel prove that formally real skew fields give rise to spaces of orderings. Inwx 8Ž also seewx 9. Kalhoff extends this to ternary fieldsŽ. also called planar ternary rings . Inwx 10, 11Ž also see wx28. Kleinstein and Rosenberg and Knebusch, respectively, show how spaces of orderings arise in the study of realŽ. commutative semi-local rings. Orderings on commutative rings have been studied extensively since the introduction of the real spectrum by Coste and Roy in the early 1980s. * E-mail address:
[email protected]. ² The research of the second author was supported in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. E-mail address:
[email protected] ask.ca. ³ E-mail address:
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