This monograph is concerned with exchange rings in various conditions related to stable range. Diagonal reduction of regular matrices and cleanness of square matrices are also discussed. Readers will come across various topics: cancellation of modules, comparability of modules, cleanness, monoid theory, matrix theory, K-theory, topology, amongst others. This is a first-ever book that contains many of these topics considered under stable range conditions. It will be of great interest to researchers and graduate students involved in ring and module theories.

This monograph is concerned with exchange rings in various conditions related to stable range. Diagonal reduction of regular matrices and cleanness of square matrices are also discussed. Readers will come across various topics: cancellation of modules, comparability of modules, cleanness, monoid theory, matrix theory, K-theory, topology, amongst others. This is a first-ever book that contains many of these topics considered under stable range conditions. It will be of great interest to researchers and graduate students involved in ring and module theories.

Based in large part on the comprehensive "First Course in Ring Theory" by the same author, this book provides a comprehensive set of problems and solutions in ring theory that will serve not only as a teaching aid to instructors using that book, but also for students, who will see how ring theory theorems are applied to solving ring-theoretic problems and how good proofs are written. The author demonstrates that problem-solving is a lively process: in "Comments" following many solutions he discusses what happens if a hypothesis is removed, whether the exercise can be further generalized, what would be a concrete example for the exercise, and so forth. The book is thus much more than a solution manual.

It is a great satisfaction for a mathematician to witness the growth and expansion of a theory in which he has taken some part during its early years. When H. Weyl coined the words "classical groups", foremost in his mind were their connections with invariant theory, which his famous book helped to revive. Although his approach in that book was deliberately algebraic, his interest in these groups directly derived from his pioneering study of the special case in which the scalars are real or complex numbers, where for the first time he injected Topology into Lie theory. But ever since the definition of Lie groups, the analogy between simple classical groups over finite fields and simple classical groups over IR or C had been observed, even if the concept of "simplicity" was not quite the same in both cases. With the discovery of the exceptional simple complex Lie algebras by Killing and E. Cartan, it was natural to look for corresponding groups over finite fields, and already around 1900 this was done by Dickson for the exceptional Lie algebras G and E • However, a deep reason for this 2 6 parallelism was missing, and it is only Chevalley who, in 1955 and 1961, discovered that to each complex simple Lie algebra corresponds, by a uniform process, a group scheme (fj over the ring Z of integers, from which, for any field K, could be derived a group (fj(K).