When Are There Infinitely Many Irreducible Elements in a Principal Ideal Domain?

DOI10.2307/4145215MaRDI QIDQ4469099zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Fabrizio Zanello

Publication date 14 June 2004

Published in The American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411259

zbMATH Keywords

principal ideal domainirreducible elements

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Polynomial rings and ideals; rings of integer-valued polynomials (13F20) Divisibility and factorizations in commutative rings (13A05) Principal ideal rings (13F10)

Abstract: It has been a well-known fact since Euclid's time that there exist infinitely many rational primes. Two natural questions arise: In which other rings, sufficiently similar to the integers, are there infinitely many irreducible elements? Is there a unifying algebraic concept that characterizes such rings? The purpose of this note is to place the fact concerning the infinity of primes into a more general context, one that also includes the interesting case of the factorial domains of algebraic integers in a number field. We show that, if $A$ is a P.I.D., then $A$ contains infinitely many (pairwise nonassociate) irreducible elements if and only if every maximal ideal of $A[x]$ has the same (maximal) height.

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Cited in

(5)

• There are infinitely many primes: two ring-theoretic variations on Euclid
• On ideals in Prüfer domains of polynomials
• Is there an infinite field whose multiplicative group is indecomposable?
• On the infinitude of prime elements
• On prime elements in commutative domains

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