For the past ten years, alternative loop rings have intrigued mathematicians from a wide cross-section of modern algebra. As a consequence, the theory of alternative loop rings has grown tremendously.One of the main developments is the complete characterization of loops which have an alternative but not associative, loop ring. Furthermore, there is a very close relationship between the algebraic structures of loop rings and of group rings over 2-groups.Another major topic of research is the study of the unit loop of the integral loop ring. Here the interaction between loop rings and group rings is of immense interest.This is the first survey of the theory of alternative loop rings and related issues. Due to the strong interaction between loop rings and certain group rings, many results on group rings have been included, some of which are published for the first time. The authors often provide a new viewpoint and novel, elementary proofs in cases where results are already known.The authors assume only that the reader is familiar with basic ring-theoretic and group-theoretic concepts. They present a work which is very much self-contained. It is thus a valuable reference to the student as well as the research mathematician. An extensive bibliography of references which are either directly relevant to the text or which offer supplementary material of interest, are also included.

For the past ten years, alternative loop rings have intrigued mathematicians from a wide cross-section of modern algebra. As a consequence, the theory of alternative loop rings has grown tremendously. One of the main developments is the complete characterization of loops which have an alternative but not associative, loop ring. Furthermore, there is a very close relationship between the algebraic structures of loop rings and of group rings over 2-groups. Another major topic of research is the study of the unit loop of the integral loop ring. Here the interaction between loop rings and group rings is of immense interest. This is the first survey of the theory of alternative loop rings and related issues. Due to the strong interaction between loop rings and certain group rings, many results on group rings have been included, some of which are published for the first time. The authors often provide a new viewpoint and novel, elementary proofs in cases where results are already known. The authors assume only that the reader is familiar with basic ring-theoretic and group-theoretic concepts. They present a work which is very much self-contained. It is thus a valuable reference to the student as well as the research mathematician. An extensive bibliography of references which are either directly relevant to the text or which offer supplementary material of interest, are also included.

Generally, in any human field, a Smarandache Structure on a set A means a weak structure W on A such that there exists a proper subset B in A which is embedded with a stronger structure S. These types of structures occur in our everyday's life, that's why we study them in this book. Thus, as a particular case: A Non-associative ring is a non-empty set R together with two binary operations '+' and '.' such that (R, +) is an additive abelian group and (R, .) is a groupoid. For all a, b, c in R we have (a + b) . c = a . c + b . c and c . (a + b) = c . a + c . b. A Smarandache non-associative ring is a non-associative ring (R, +, .) which has a proper subset P in R, that is an associative ring (with respect to the same binary operations on R).

This volume contains contributions from the conference on "Algebras, Representations and Applications" (Maresias, Brazil, August 26-September 1, 2007), in honor of Ivan Shestakov's 60th birthday. The collection of papers presented here is of great interest to graduate students and researchers working in the theory of Lie and Jordan algebras and superalgebras and their representations, Hopf algebras, Poisson algebras, Quantum Groups, Group Rings and other topics.