Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2012/iii/paper-4/1/a/solution

Choose a separation into two nonempty clopen sets. Both are closed in the Zariski topology, so write and for ideals . Their disjointness gives . A proper ideal lies in a maximal ideal, so this forces .
Their union is all of the spectrum of a commutative ring, and . Thus every prime ideal contains , so
The last equality uses that is a reduced ring. For comaximal ideals, : if and , then . Therefore the Chinese remainder theorem gives
The isomorphism sends to its two residue classes. Its kernel is ; for surjectivity, and are obtained from , where , and . The two factors are nonzero because are nonempty, so are proper.
This is a disconnected reduced spectrum product decomposition. The elements also satisfy , , , exhibiting the ring product decomposition by an idempotent. No Noetherian hypothesis is required.

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