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An element that is a left or a right zero divisor is simply called a zero divisor. [2] An element a that is both a left and a right zero divisor is called a two-sided zero divisor (the nonzero x such that ax = 0 may be different from the nonzero y such that ya = 0). If the ring is commutative, then the left and right zero divisors are the same.
But in the ring Z/6Z, 2 is a zero divisor. This equation has two distinct solutions, x = 1 and x = 4, so the expression is undefined. In field theory, the expression is only shorthand for the formal expression ab −1, where b −1 is the multiplicative inverse of b.
Then it is possible to have zero divisors in the ring of regular functions, and consequently the fraction field no longer exists. The naive solution is to replace the fraction field by the total quotient ring, that is, to invert every element that is not a zero divisor. Unfortunately, in general, the total quotient ring does not produce a ...
Zero divisors have a topological interpretation, at least in the case of commutative rings: a ring R is an integral domain if and only if it is reduced and its spectrum Spec R is an irreducible topological space. The first property is often considered to encode some infinitesimal information, whereas the second one is more geometric.
Characteristic The characteristic of the field F is the smallest positive integer n such that n·1 = 0; here n·1 stands for n summands 1 + 1 + 1 + ... + 1.If no such n exists, we say the characteristic is zero.
A field contains no zero divisors and this property is inherited by any subring, so the ring of integers of is an integral domain. The field K {\displaystyle K} is the field of fractions of the integral domain O K {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}_{K}} .
If one interprets the definition of divisor literally, every a is a divisor of 0, since one can take x = 0. Because of this, it is traditional to abuse terminology by making an exception for zero divisors: one calls an element a in a commutative ring a zero divisor if there exists a nonzero x such that ax = 0. [2]
A finite-dimensional unital associative algebra (over any field) is a division algebra if and only if it has no nonzero zero divisors. Whenever A is an associative unital algebra over the field F and S is a simple module over A, then the endomorphism ring of S is a division algebra over F; every associative division algebra over F arises in ...