Publisher's Synopsis
This book surveys more than 125 years of aspects of associative algebras, especially ring and module theory. It is the first to probe so extensively such a wealth of historical development. Moreover, the author brings the reader up to date, in particular through his report on the subject in the second half of the twentieth century. Included in the book are certain categorical properties from theorems of Frobenius and Stickelberger on the primary decomposition of finite Abelian groups; Hilbert's basis theorem and his Nullstellensatz, including the modern formulations of the latter by Krull, Goldman, and others; Maschke's theorem on the representation theory of finite groups over a field; and the fundamental theorems of Wedderburn on the structure of finite dimensional algebras and finite skew fields and their extensions by Braver, Kaplansky, Chevalley, Goldie, and others. A special feature of the book is the in-depth study of rings with chain condition on annihilator ideals pioneered by Noether, Artin, and Jacobson and refined and extended by many later mathematicians.
