Some model theory of Bézout difference rings -- a survey (Q998093)

This is a survey article describing the background to the author's joint work with \textit{E. Hrushovski} [J. Algebra 315, No. 1, 76--120 (2007; Zbl 1127.03033)] on a particular class of difference rings. It gives an interesting and useful overview of the wide range of work that has been done in recent years on difference rings (rings with a distinguished endomorphism), in particular with respect to questions from mathematical logic: model theory and decidability results. The paper starts with a brief survey of the work, which began in the early 1990s, on difference fields, including the axiomatizability (and hence the decidability) of the theory ACFA of existentially closed difference fields. Theories of difference rings are considerably more complicated. There follows a brief summary of the key concepts that enter into the study of difference rings, and a summary of results from the above-mentioned paper. These include, under certain conditions, the existence of model companions to the theory of modules over such a ring, and some decidability and undecidability results. The theory of modules of a difference ring turns out to be of central importance. If \((R,\sigma)\) is a difference ring which is a \(K\)-algebra, where \((K,\sigma)\) is a difference field containing the subring of \(R\) fixed by \(\sigma\), one passes to the skew polynomial ring \(K[t;\sigma]\) and considers \(R\) as a module over this ring by the natural action. The module theory of \(R\) is often much more accessible than the full theory of \((R,\sigma)\), but contains a lot of useful information. Throughout seven subsections we see brief and informative descriptions of various results on the model theory of difference rings. In the final section, topological difference fields (valued fields with a distinguished automorphism that respects the valuation) are considered.