arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to G. F. Birkenmeier.
Idempotents dominate the structure theory of rings. The Peirce decomposition induced by an idempotent provides a natural environment for defining and classifying new types of rings. This point of view offers a way to unify and to expand the classical theory of semiperfect rings and idempotents to much larger classes of rings. Examples and applications are included.
We study a ring containing a complete set of orthogonal idempotents as a generalized matrix ring via its Peirce decomposition. We focus on the case where some of the underlying bimodule homomorphisms are zero. Upper and lower triangular generalized matrix rings are pertinent examples of the class of rings which we study. The triviality of the particular bimodule homomorphisms motivates the introduction of three new types of idempotents, namely inner Peirce trivial idempotents, outer Peirce trivial idempotents and Peirce trivial idempotents. These idempotents provide the main tools in our investigations.
In this paper, we study module theoretic definitions of the Baer and related ring concepts. We say a module is s.Baer if the right annihilator of a nonempty subset of the module is generated by an idempotent in the ring. We show that s.Baer modules satisfy a number of closure properties. Under certain conditions, a torsion theory is established for the s.Baer modules, and we provide examples of s.Baer torsion modules and modules with a nonzero s.Baer radical. The other principal interest of this paper is to provide explicit connections between s.Baer modules and projective modules. Among other results, we show that every s.Baer module is an essential extension of a projective module. Additionally, we prove, with limited and natural assumptions, that in a generalized triangular matrix ring every s.Baer submodule of the ring is projective. As an application, we show that every prime ring with a minimal right ideal has the strong summand intersection property. Numerous examples are provided to illustrate, motivate, and delimit the theory.