This book offers an original account of the theory of near-rings, with a considerable amount of material which has not previously been available in book form, some of it completely new. The book begins with an introduction to the subject and goes on to consider the theory of near-fields, transformation near-rings and near-rings hosted by a group. The bulk of the chapter on near-fields has not previously been available in English. The transformation near-rings chapters considerably augment existing knowledge and the chapters on product hosting are essentially new. Other chapters contain original material on new classes of near-rings and non-abelian group cohomology. The Theory of Near-Rings will be of interest to researchers in the subject and, more broadly, ring and representation theorists. The presentation is elementary and self-contained, with the necessary background in group and ring theory available in standard references.

Projective modules: Modules and homomorphisms Projective modules Completely reducible modules Wedderburn rings Artinian rings Hereditary rings Dedekind domains Projective dimension Tensor products Local rings Polynomial rings: Skew polynomial rings Grothendieck groups Graded rings and modules Induced modules Syzygy theorem Patching theorem Serre conjecture Big projectives Generic flatness Nullstellensatz Injective modules: Injective modules Injective dimension Essential extensions Maximal ring of quotients Classical ring of quotients Goldie rings Uniform dimension Uniform injective modules Reduced rank Index

Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is and begin with the answers. Then one day, that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Gad in Crane Feathers' in R. Brown 'The point of a Pin'. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of s9phistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "experimental mathematics", "CFD", "completely integrable systems", "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order", which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.

A clear and structured introduction to the subject. After a chapter on the definition of rings and modules there are brief accounts of Artinian rings, commutative Noetherian rings and ring constructions, such as the direct product, Tensor product and rings of fractions, followed by a description of free rings. Readers are assumed to have a basic understanding of set theory, group theory and vector spaces. Over two hundred carefully selected exercises are included, most with outline solutions.

First Published in 2018. This book grew out of a course of lectures given to third year undergraduates at Oxford University and it has the modest aim of producing a rapid introduction to the subject. It is designed to be read by students who have had a first elementary course in general algebra. On the other hand, it is not intended as a substitute for the more voluminous tracts such as Zariski-Samuel or Bourbaki. We have concentrated on certain central topics, and large areas, such as field theory, are not touched. In content we cover rather more ground than Northcott and our treatment is substantially different in that, following the modern trend, we put more emphasis on modules and localization.

The authors develop thorough and complete foundations for the method of almost etale extensions, which is at the basis of Faltings' approach to p-adic Hodge theory. The central notion is that of an "almost ring". Almost rings are the commutative unitary monoids in a tensor category obtained as a quotient V-Mod/S of the category V-Mod of modules over a fixed ring V; the subcategory S consists of all modules annihilated by a fixed ideal m of V, satisfying certain natural conditions. The reader is assumed to be familiar with general categorical notions, some basic commutative algebra and some advanced homological algebra (derived categories, simplicial methods). Apart from these general prerequisites, the text is as self-contained as possible. One novel feature of the book - compared with Faltings' earlier treatment - is the systematic exploitation of the cotangent complex, especially for the study of deformations of almost algebras.