A noncommutative formal power series is an element of a noncommutative formal power series ring. Its constant term is the coefficient of the empty word. Formal sums are interpreted coefficient by coefficient; analytic convergence is not required.
View as a noncommutative formal power series ring, and let take the coefficient of the empty word. This is a ring homomorphism, since the empty word has only the factorization . In particular the two-sided ideal generated by lies in .
In fact . Every noncommutative formal power series with zero constant term can be partitioned according to the first letter of its words and written
Both summands belong to the two-sided ideal .
For , define the formal geometric series
This defines an element of : since has zero constant term, every word in has length at least . Thus the coefficient of a fixed word of length receives contributions only from , each a finite sum.
For each finite partial sum , associativity gives both identities
In every fixed word degree the last term vanishes once is large enough. It follows coefficient by coefficient that . Hence
The argument is formal and uses no analytic convergence. More generally, every noncommutative formal power series with a nonzero rational constant term is a unit, after factoring out that scalar. This is the unit criterion for noncommutative formal power series.
Take . We first check that this noncommutative formal power series ring is a noncommutative domain. For nonzero , let be the smallest lengths of words with nonzero coefficients in , respectively. Their degree- and degree- parts are nonzero homogeneous polynomials in the free associative algebra.
Choose words with nonzero coefficients in . In , the coefficient of is the product of those two coefficients: a word of length has a unique splitting into a prefix of length and a suffix of length . This product is nonzero in . The degree- part of is exactly , since all lower parts of and vanish. Thus , proving that is a noncommutative domain.
By the defining property of the free associative algebra, there is a ring homomorphism
The same substitution defines a ring automorphism of , with inverse , . Composing this ring automorphism with the natural inclusion proves that is injective.
Finally,
Their constant terms are , respectively, all nonzero. By the unit criterion for noncommutative formal power series proved in c, all four elements are units. Therefore and have every required property. The embedding changes the images of the generators, so the failure of the original monomial left Ore set in b presents no obstruction.