The Family of Residue Fields of a Zero-Dimensional Commutative Ring
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 82 (1992) 131-153 131 North-Holland The family of residue fields of a zero-dimensional commutative ring Robert Gilmer Department of Mathematics BlS4, Florida State University. Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA William Heinzer* Department of Mathematics, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA Communicated by C.A. Weibel Received 28 December 1991 Abstract Gilmer, R. and W. Heinzer, The family of residue fields of a zero-dimensional commutative ring, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 82 (1992) 131-153. Given a zero-dimensional commutative ring R, we investigate the structure of the family 9(R) of residue fields of R. We show that if a family 9 of fields contains a finite subset {F,, , F,,} such that every field in 9 contains an isomorphic copy of at least one of the F,, then there exists a zero-dimensional reduced ring R such that 3 = 9(R). If every residue field of R is a finite field, or is a finite-dimensional vector space over a fixed field K, we prove, conversely, that the family 9(R) has. to within isomorphism. finitely many minimal elements. 1. Introduction All rings considered in this paper are assumed to be commutative and to contain a unity element. If R is a subring of a ring S, we assume that the unity of S is contained in R, and hence is the unity of R. If R is a ring and if {Ma}a,, is the family of maximal ideals of R, we denote by 9(R) the family {RIM,:a E A} of residue fields of R and by 9"(R) a set of isomorphism-class representatives of S(R).In connection with work on the class of hereditarily zero-dimensional rings in [S], we encountered the problem of determining what families of fields can be realized in the form S(R) for some zero-dimensional ring R.
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