Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 4 1 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
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 , soThe last equality uses that is a reduced ring. For comaximal ideals, : if and , then . Therefore the Chinese remainder theorem givesThe 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.