The conference ‘Rings and Modules’, in honour of Patrick F. Smith's 65th birthday and on the occasion of his retirement, gathered in Lisbon 67 of Patrick Smith's students, co-authors and friends from all over the world. The conference was held at Centro de Álgebra da Universidade de Lisboa (CAUL), 16th–19th September 2008.

A module M is called poor whenever it is N-injective, then the module N is semisimple. In this paper the properties of poor modules are investigated and are used to characterize various families of rings.

In this survey paper we present some results relating the Goldie dimension, dual Krull dimension and subdirect irreducibility in modules, torsion theories, Grothendieck categories and lattices. Our interest in studying this topic is rooted in a nice module theoretical result of Carl Faith [Commun. Algebra27 (1999), 1807–1810], characterizing Noetherian modules M by means of the finiteness of the Goldie dimension of all its quotient modules and the ACC on its subdirectly irreducible submodules. Thus, we extend his result in a dual Krull dimension setting and consider its dualization, not only in modules, but also in upper continuous modular lattices, with applications to torsion theories and Grothendieck categories.

We call a module Malmost perfect if every M-generated flat module is M-projective. Any perfect module is almost perfect. We characterize almost-perfect modules and investigate some of their properties. It is proved that a ring R is a left almost-perfect ring if and only if every finitely generated left R-module is almost perfect. R is left perfect if and only if every (projective) left R-module is almost perfect.

Motivated by a relation on submodules of a module used by both A. W. Goldie and P. F. Smith, we say submodules X, Y of M are β* equivalent, Xβ*Y, if and only if is small in and is small in . We show that the β* relation is an equivalence relation and has good behaviour with respect to addition of submodules, homomorphisms and supplements. We apply these results to introduce the class of -supplemented modules and to investigate this class and the class of H-supplemented modules. These classes are located among various well-known classes of modules related to the class of lifting modules. Moreover these classes are used to explore an open question of S. H. Mohamed and B. J. Mueller. Examples are provided to illustrate and delimit the theory.

The purpose of this paper is to study finiteness conditions on injective hulls of simple modules over Noetherian down-up algebras. We will show that the Noetherian down-up algebras A(α, β, γ) which are fully bounded are precisely those which are module-finite over a central subalgebra. We show that injective hulls of simple A(α, β, γ)-modules are locally Artinian provided the roots of X2 − αX − β are distinct roots of unity or both equal to 1.

We recall a version of the Osofsky–Smith theorem in the context of a Grothendieck category and derive several consequences of this result. For example, it is deduced that every locally finitely generated Grothendieck category with a family of completely injective finitely generated generators is semi-simple. We also discuss the torsion-theoretic version of the classical Osofsky theorem which characterizes semi-simple rings as those rings whose every cyclic module is injective.

We show that the endomorphism rings of kernels ker ϕ of non-injective morphisms ϕ between indecomposable injective modules are either local or have two maximal ideals, the module ker ϕ is determined up to isomorphism by two invariants called monogeny class and upper part, and a weak form of the Krull–Schmidt theorem holds for direct sums of these kernels. We prove with an example that our pathological decompositions actually take place. We show that a direct sum of n kernels of morphisms between injective indecomposable modules can have exactly n! pairwise non-isomorphic direct-sum decompositions into kernels of morphisms of the same type. If ER is an injective indecomposable module and S is its endomorphism ring, the duality Hom(−, ER) transforms kernels of morphisms ER → ER into cyclically presented left modules over the local ring S, sending the monogeny class into the epigeny class and the upper part into the lower part.

In this paper we consider for a non-unital ring R, the category of firm R-modules for a non-unital ring R, i.e. the modules M such that the canonical morphism μM : R ⊗RM → M given by r ⊗ m ↦ rm is an isomorphism. This category is a natural generalization of the usual category of unitary modules for a ring with identity and shares many properties with it. The only difference is that monomorphisms are not always kernels. It has been proved recently that this category is not Abelian in general by providing an example of a monomorphism that is not a kernel in a particular case. In this paper we study the lattices of monomorphisms and kernels, proving that the lattice of monomorphisms is a modular lattice and that the category of firm modules is Abelian if and only if the composition of two kernels is a kernel.

Let R be a semiprime algebra over a field of characteristic zero acted finitely on by a finite-dimensional Lie superalgebra L = L0 ⊕ L1. It is shown that if L is nilpotent, [L0, L1] = 0 and the subalgebra of invariants RL is central, then the action of L0 on R is trivial and R satisfies the standard polynomial identity of degree 2 ⋅ []. Examples of actions of nilpotent Lie superalgebras, with central invariants and with [L0, L1] ≠ 0, are constructed.

R is called a right WV-ring if each simple right R-module is injective relative to proper cyclics. If R is a right WV-ring, then R is right uniform or a right V-ring. It is shown that a right WV-ring R is right noetherian if and only if each right cyclic module is a direct sum of a projective module and a CS (complements are summands, a.k.a. ‘extending modules’) or noetherian module. For a finitely generated module M with projective socle over a V-ring R such that every subfactor of M is a direct sum of a projective module and a CS or noetherian module, we show M = X ⊕ T, where X is semisimple and T is noetherian with zero socle. In the case where M = R, we get R = S ⊕ T, where S is a semisimple artinian ring and T is a direct sum of right noetherian simple rings with zero socle. In addition, if R is a von Neumann regular ring, then it is semisimple artinian.

Since Azumaya introduced the notion of A-injectivity in 1974, several generalizations have been investigated by a number of authors. We introduce some more generalizations and discuss their connection to the previous ones.

If the injective hull E = E(RR) of a ring R is a rational extension of RR, then E has a unique structure as a ring whose multiplication is compatible with R-module multiplication. We give some known examples where such a compatible ring structure exists when E is a not a rational extension of RR, and other examples where such a compatible ring structure on E cannot exist. With insights gleaned from these examples, we study compatible ring structures on E, especially in the case when ER, and hence RR ⊆ ER, has finite length. We show that for RR and ER of finite length, if ER has a ring structure compatible with R-module multiplication, then E is a quasi-Frobenius ring under that ring structure and any two compatible ring structures on E have left regular representations conjugate in Λ = EndR(ER), so the ring structure is unique up to isomorphism. We also show that if ER is of finite length, then ER has a ring structure compatible with its R-module structure and this ring structure is unique as a set of left multiplications if and only if ER is a rational extension of RR.

We survey some old and recent results concerning the Goldie dimension of modules and modular lattices and its properties which are counterparts of properties of the dimension of linear spaces.

Algebras A and coalgebras C over a commutative ring R are defined by properties of the (endo)functors A ⊗R – and C ⊗R – on the category of R-modules R. Generalising these notions, monads and comonads were introduced on arbitrary categories, and it turned out that some of their basic relations do not depend on the specific properties of the tensor product. In particular, the adjoint of any comonad is a monad (and vice versa), and hence, for any coalgebra C, HomR(C, –), the right adjoint of C ⊗R –, is a monad on R. The modules for the monad HomR(C, –) were called contramodules by Eilenberg–Moore and the purpose of this talk is to outline the related constructions and explain the relationship between C-comodules and C-contramodules. The results presented grew out from cooperation with G. Böhm, T. Brzeziński and B. Mesablishvili.