Herstein's question about simple rings with involution
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to try to answer Herstein's question concerning simple rings with involution, namely: If is a simple ring with an involution of the first kind, with and , is it true that ? We shall see that in such a ring , . We shall bring two possible criteria, each shows when . The first criterion: There exist such that and . The second criterion: There exist such that and . Actually, those results are true without any restriction on the dimension of over . In the special case of matrices (with the transpose involution and with the symplectic involution) over a field of characteristic not equal to 2, it is not difficult to find, for example, such that and for every , . Therefore, proving Herstein's remark that for matrices the answer is known to be positive. Similar results for , , , , and can also be found.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.3353,
title = {Herstein's question about simple rings with involution},
author = {Vered Moskowicz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.3353},
year = {2012}
}