clean semiprime strongfstrong-rings with bounded inversion.pdfVIP

COMMUNICATIONS IN ALGEBRA Vol. 31, No. 7, pp. 3295–3304, 2003 Clean Semiprime f -Rings with Bounded Inversion Warren Wm. McGovern* Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA ABSTRACT An element in a ring is called clean if it may be written as a sum of a unit and idempotent. The ring itself is called clean if every element is clean. Recently, Anderson and Camillo (Anderson, D. D., Camillo, V. (2002). Commutative rings whose elements are a sum of a unit and an idempotent. Comm. Algebra 30(7):3327–3336) has shown that for commutative rings every von-Neumann regular ring as well as zero-dimensional rings are clean. Moreover, every clean ring is a pm-ring, that is every prime ideal is contained in a unique maximal ideal. In the same article, the authors give an example of a commu- tative ring which is a pm-ring yet not clean, e.g., C(R). It is this example which interests us. Our discussion shall take place in a more general setting. We assume that all rings are commutative with 1. *Correspondence: Warren Wm. McGovern, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA; E-mail: warrenb@. 3295 DOI: 10.1081/AGB-120022226 0092-7872 (Print); 1532-4125 (Online) Copyright # 2003 by Marcel Dekker, Inc. 3296 McGovern Key Words: Clean ring; Zero-dimensional space; f -rings; Bounded inversion. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 13A99; 54C40; 54D35.