On functional identities andd-free subsets of rings. II

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[This is a joint review for Parts I and II, see Zbl 0991.16017.] The theory of functional identities deals with identities of a polynomial type satisfied by all elements from some appropriate subset \(S\) of a ring \(A\), which also involve arbitrary maps. A typical example, also extensively studied in the papers under review, is the identity of the form \(\sum^n_{i=1}E_i(x_1,\dots,x_{i-1},x_{i+1},\dots,x_n)x_i+x_iF_i(x_1,\dots,x_{i-1},x_{i+1},\dots,x_n)=0\) for all \(x_1,\dots,x_n\in S\) (here, \(E_i\) and \(F_i\) are any maps from \(S^{n-1}=S\times\cdots\times S\) to \(A\)). The usual goal when studying a certain functional identity is to show that either all maps involved are of some special form (which one calls a standard solution of this identity) or, when this is not the case, that the ring must have a very special structure (often it is a PI ring of some ``low degree). An introductory account on functional identities is given in the reviewer's paper `Functional identities: A survey' [Contemp. Math. 259, 93--109 (2000; Zbl 0967.16011)]. The two papers under review are one of the milestones in the development of this theory. They extend it to a higher level of generality by introducing and studying the concept of a \(d\)-free subset of (any!) ring. The precise definition and results are too technical to be stated here. A very rough description of a \(d\)-free set, however, is that some special functional identities (including the one stated above) in not ``too many (the number depends on the positive integer \(d\)) variables have only standard solutions on this set. It turns out, quite surprisingly, that under rather mild assumptions various sets are indeed \(d\)-free. Next, the authors show that \(d\)-free sets have many useful properties. In particular, the only solutions of some special but important functional identities on such sets are the so-called quasi-polynomials. Though these two papers have been published only recently, their results have already been used in a number of papers. In particular, solutions of all remaining Herstein's Lie map problems, given in a series of papers `On Herstein's Lie map conjectures, I, II, III' by \textit{K. I. Beidar}, \textit{M. Brešar}, \textit{M. A. Chebotar} and \textit{W. S. Martindale} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 353, No. 10, 4235--4260 (2001; Zbl 1019.16019) (part I); J. Algebra 238, No. 1, 239--264 (2001; Zbl 1019.16020) (part II); J. Algebra 249, No. 1, 59--94 (2002; Zbl 1019.16021) (part III)] depend on them.




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