English

Existence of Erd\H{o}s-Burgess constant in commutative rings

Combinatorics 2020-05-20 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

Let RR be a commutative unitary ring. An idempotent in RR is an element eRe\in R with e2=ee^2=e. The Erd\H{o}s-Burgess constant associated with the ring RR is the smallest positive integer \ell (if exists) such that for any given \ell elements (not necessarily distinct) of RR, say a1,,aRa_1,\ldots,a_{\ell}\in R, there must exist a nonempty subset J{1,2,,}J\subset \{1,2,\ldots,\ell\} with jJaj\prod\limits_{j\in J} a_j being an idempotent. In this paper, we prove that except for an infinite commutative ring with a very special form, the Erd\H{o}s-Burgess constant of the ring RR exists if and only if RR is finite.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.08955,
  title  = {Existence of Erd\H{o}s-Burgess constant in commutative rings},
  author = {Guoqing Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.08955},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2002.11489