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Concept
Commutative ring
Summary
In mathematics, a commutative ring is a ring in which the multiplication operation is commutative. The study of commutative rings is called commutative algebra. Complementarily, noncommutative algebra is the study of ring properties that are not specific to commutative rings. This distinction results from the high number of fundamental properties of commutative rings that do not extend to noncommutative rings.
A ring is a set equipped with two binary operations, i.e. operations combining any two elements of the ring to a third. They are called addition and multiplication and commonly denoted by "" and ""; e.g. and . To form a ring these two operations have to satisfy a number of properties: the ring has to be an abelian group under addition as well as a monoid under multiplication, where multiplication distributes over addition; i.e., . The identity elements for addition and multiplication are denoted and , respectively.
If the multiplication is commutative, i.e.
then the ring is called commutative. In the remainder of this article, all rings will be commutative, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
An important example, and in some sense crucial, is the ring of integers with the two operations of addition and multiplication. As the multiplication of integers is a commutative operation, this is a commutative ring. It is usually denoted as an abbreviation of the German word Zahlen (numbers).
A field is a commutative ring where and every non-zero element is invertible; i.e., has a multiplicative inverse such that . Therefore, by definition, any field is a commutative ring. The rational, real and complex numbers form fields.
If is a given commutative ring, then the set of all polynomials in the variable whose coefficients are in forms the polynomial ring, denoted . The same holds true for several variables.
If is some topological space, for example a subset of some , real- or complex-valued continuous functions on form a commutative ring. The same is true for differentiable or holomorphic functions, when the two concepts are defined, such as for a complex manifold.
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