Mathematics and Its Applications

This monograph discusses rings closed to von Neumann regular rings. The following classes are considered: exchange rings, p-regular rings, weakly regular rings, rings with comparability, V-rings, and max rings. Every Artinian or von Neumann regular ring A is an exchange ring (this means that for every one of its elements a, there exists an idempotent e of A such that aA contains eA and (1-a)A contains (1-e)A). Exchange rings are very useful in the study of direct decompositions of modules, and have many applications to theory of Banach algebras, ring theory, and K-theory. In particular, exchange rings and rings with comparability provide a key to a number of outstanding cancellation problems for finitely generated projective modules. Every von Neumann regular ring is a weakly regular p-regular ring (a ring A is p-regular if for every one of its elements a, there is a positive integer n such that a is contained in aAa) and every Artinian ring is a p-regular max ring (a ring is a max ring if every one of its nonzero modules has a maximal submodule). Thus many results on finite-dimensional algebras and regular rings are extended to essentially larger classes of rings. Starting from a basic understanding of ring theory, the theory of rings close to regular is presented and accompanied with complete proofs.