Recently A. D. Sands [7] solved a problem posed in [6], and characterised the semisimple classes of associative rings as classes being regular, coinductive and closed under extensions. It is the purpose of this note to prove the same assertion for alternative rings. This result is perhaps not surprising, nevertheless its proof cannot be considered an easy one, and it requires a technique of dealing with ideals of ideals. In addition, semisimple classes of hereditary radicals and those of supernilpotent radicals will be characterised as easy consequences of our theorem.

The Cartan determinant conjecture for left artinian rings was verified for quasihereditary rings showing detC(R) = detC(R/I), where I is a protective ideal generated by a primitive idempotent. This article identifies classes of rings generalizing the quasihereditary ones, first by relaxing the “projective” condition on heredity ideals. These rings, called left k-hereditary are all of finite global dimension. Next a class of rings is defined which includes left serial rings of finite global dimension, quasihereditary and left 1-hereditary rings, but also rings of infinite global dimension. For such rings, the Cartan determinant conjecture is true, as is its converse. This is shown by matrix reduction. Examples compare and contrast these rings with other known families and a recipe is given for constructing them.

In this paper, we consider a reaction infiltration problem consisting of a parabolic equation for the concentration, an elliptic equation for the pressure, and an ordinary differential equation for the porosity. Existence and uniqueness of a global classical solution is proved for bounded domains Ω⊂RN, under suitable boundary conditions.

Characterization and uniqueness results are given for uniform approximation which extend to suns previously known results for convex sets.

Train algebras were first introduced by Etherington in (1) and proved very useful in dealing with problems in mathematical genetics. The types of algebras which arose were commutative, non-associative and finite-dimensional. It proved convenient in the general theory to regard them as defined over the complex numbers. We remind the reader of some basic definitions. A baric algebra is one which admits a non-trivial homomorphism into its coefficient field K. A (principal) train algebra is baric and has a rank equation in which the coefficients of a general element x depend only on its baric value, generally called the weight of x. A special train algebra (STA) is a baric algebra in which the nilideal is nilpotent and all its right powers are ideals; the nilideal being the set of elements of A of weight zero. In (2) Etherington showed that in a baric algebra one can always take a very simple basis consisting of a distinguished element of unit weight and all other basis elements of weight zero.

Let X be a complex Banach space, and let and denote respectively the algebras of bounded and compact operators on X. The quotient algebra is called the Calkin algebra associated with X. It is known that both and are complex Banach algebras with unit e. For such unital Banach algebras B, set

and define the numerical range of x ∈ B as

x is said to be hermitian if W(x)⊆R. It is known that

Fact 1. ([4 vol. I, p. 46]) x is hermitian if and only if ‖eiαx‖ = (or ≦)1 for all α ∈ R, where ex is defined by

A congruence ρ on a semigroup is said to be idempotent-separating if each ρ-class contains at most one idempotent. For any idempotent e of a semigroup S the set eSe is a subsemigroup of S with identity e and group of units He, the maximal subgroup of S containing e. The purpose of the present note is to show that if S is a regular O-bisimple semigroup and e is a non-zero idempotent of 5 then there is a one-to-one correspondence between the idempotentseparating congruences on 5 and the subgroups N of He with the property that aN ⊆ Na for all right units a of eSe and Nb ⊆ bN for all left units b of eSe. Some special cases of this result are discussed and, in the final section, an application is made to the principal factors of the full transformation semigroup on a set X.