Distributor ideals in near-ring of polynomials (Q910475)

It is well known that the distributor ideal is defined as the smallest ideal containing all distributor elements. In this paper we prove that the distributor ideal of the near-ring of polynomials over a commutative ring with 1, agrees with the smallest ideal of R[X] containing 1; in particular the distributor ideal of R[X] is a principal ideal (generated by a single element). The proof requires a series of lemmas as well as a number of results on near-rings of polynomials. By the way, distributor ideals of R[X] over a large class of commutative rings R, with 1, which contains all fields and all the rings with positive odd characteristic are determined. This ideal D is (in the case of polynomial near-rings) the smallest ideal of R[X] such that the factor near-ring R[X]/D is a ring. We observe that in many cases \(D=R[X]\). If we now restrict ourselves to \(R_ 0[X]\) (the zero-symmetric part of R[X]), we find that surprisingly D is always distinct from \(R_ 0[X]\) contrary to the case of R[X].