Directly indecomposable absolute subretracts that are commutative Noetherian rings are described. This is an application of our main result characterizing unital directly indecomposable absolute subretracts which contain a maximal ideal with nonzero annihilator.

If R is a commutative unique factorization domain (UFD) then so is the ring R[x]. If R is not commutative then no such result is possible. An example is given of a bounded principal right and left ideal domain R, hence a similarity-UFD, for which the polynomial ring R[x] in a central indeterminate x is not a UFD in any reasonable sense. On the other hand, it is shown that if R is an invariant UFD then R[x] is a UFD in an appropriate sense.

Let R be an artinian ring. A family, ℳ, of isomorphism types of R-modules of finite length is said to be canonical if every R-module of finite length is a direct sum of modules whose isomorphism types are in ℳ. In this paper we show that ℳ is canonical if the following conditions are simultaneously satisfied: (a) ℳ contains the isomorphism type of every simple R-module; (b) ℳ has a preorder with the property that every nonempty subfamily of ℳ with a common bound on the lengths of its members has a smallest type; (c) if M is a nonsplit extension of a module of isomorphism type II1 by a module of isomorphism type II2, with II1, II2 in ℳ, then M contains a submodule whose type II3 is in ℳ and II1 does not precede II3. We use this result to give another proof of Kronecker's theorem on canonical pairs of matrices under equivalence. If R is a tame hereditary finite-dimensional algebra we show that there is a preorder on the family of isomorphism types of indecomposable R-modules of finite length that satisfies Conditions (b) and (c).

Special radical classes of near-rings are defined and investigated. It is shown that our approach, which differs from previous ones, does cater for all the well-known radicals of near-rings. Moreover, most of the desirable properties from their ring theory counterpart are retained. The relationship between the special radical of a near-ring and the corresponding matrix near-ring is given.

Abstract. For F a field we compute, explicitly and directly, the right Krull dimension of the algebra Qop⊗FQ for certain semisimple Artinian F-algebras Q. (Here Qop denotes the opposite ring of Q.) We use our calculation to give alternative proofs of some theorems of J. T. Stafford and A. I. Lichtman. Our methods involve a detailed study of skew polynomial rings.