A new approach to orders in simple rings with minimal one-sided ideals (Q913921)

In a recent series of papers \textit{J. B. Fountain} and \textit{V. A. R. Gould} have developed a theory of orders in rings with no identity element [cf. Commun. Algebra 18, No.9, 3085-3110 (1990)]. Their approach is based on the notion of a semigroup of quotients defined by \textit{J. Fountain} and \textit{M. Petrich} [in J. Algebra 101, 365-402 (1986; Zbl 0589.20041)]. It turns out that, in the unitary case, a ring R is an order in a regular ring Q if and only if the multiplicative semigroup of R is an order in the multiplicative semigroup of Q. Orders in simple rings with minimal one-sided ideals were described as prime rings R such that for every \(a\in R\) the left, respectively right Goldie dimension of Ra, aR is finite, and that satisfy the maximal condition on left and right annihilators of single elements of R. The main objective of the present paper is to provide a new approach to the proof of the sufficiency of these conditions. This is accomplished through an embedding of such a ring R as an order into a certain ring of linear transformations of finite rank of a vector space V. Simple rings with minimal one-sided ideals are also interpreted as Rees-matrix rings, and the Faith-Utumi theorem is extended to this setting.