With the usual commutative, unital conventions, the chain is
A field is an integral domain, and every nonzero ideal contains an invertible element and is consequently the whole ring. Its only ideals are and , so it is a principal ideal domain.
To prove the middle implication, first show that a principal ideal domain has the ascending chain condition on ideals. The union of an ascending chain is an ideal, hence is ; its generator belongs to one member of the chain, and all later members equal . Now suppose a nonzero nonunit admitted no factorization into irreducible elements. It would factor into two nonunits, at least one of which again has no such factorization. Repeating would produce a strictly increasing chain of principal ideals: if with a nonunit, , since equality and cancellation would make invertible. This contradicts the ascending chain condition. Existence of factorization follows. By the permitted fact that every irreducible element is a prime element in a principal ideal domain, any irreducible factor in one factorization divides a factor in the other; cancellation then proves uniqueness up to units and order. This is a unique factorization domain. The final implication is part of the definition of a unique factorization domain.
None of the adjacent implications reverses. The principal ideal domain is not a field, since is not invertible. The polynomial ring is a unique factorization domain, by applying the polynomial extension theorem for unique factorization domains twice, but its ideal is not principal: a generator would divide both and , so would be a unit, whereas every member of this ideal vanishes at the origin. Finally, is an integral domain as a subring of , but is not a unique factorization domain. Its multiplicative norm is . There is no element of norm or . Hence , of norms , are all irreducible: a nontrivial factorization would require one of those missing norms. The only units have norm one and are . The two factorizations
are therefore not related by associates and reordering.
The set is the ideal quotient . It contains zero. If , then , since is an subgroup. If and , then because is an ideal. Thus is an ideal.
Write and . Because , each has the form . Then , so , and . Conversely by the definition of . Therefore
so is a principal ideal. This argument uses only the commutative ring convention, not cancellation or an integral domain hypothesis.
Here a divisor is a modulus of a number field, rather than an arbitrary real-weighted divisor. Write
where is a nonzero integral ideal, the finite multiplicities are nonnegative integers, and is a set of real Archimedean places. The multiplicity of a place in a modulus is at the finite place corresponding to , is at a real place in , and is at every other infinite place. In particular complex places have multiplicity .
Let be the group of nonzero fractional ideals prime to . Put
Let consist of the principal ideals with . The generalized ideal class group is the ray class group
Let be the unit group, let be the group of ray units, and define the residue and signature group of a modulus
The first factor is omitted when . There is a group homomorphism recording the unit's finite residues and its signs. Its kernel is .
Let consist of all principal fractional ideals prime to , and put . The two short exact sequences are
and
For the first short exact sequence, weak approximation for number fields realizes every choice of finite unit residues and real signs by some prime to . Send that data to the class of in . Changing without changing its residues and signs multiplies it by an element of , so the map is well-defined. Its kernel consists exactly of data arising from units: if with , then . This gives . For the second short exact sequence, forget the ray conditions. Its kernel is , and weak approximation for number fields gives a representative prime to for every ideal class. These are the two parts of the ray class exact sequence.
For , the ring of integers of a quadratic field is . The finite modulus is trivial and both real places occur, so is the narrow ideal class group and . The two field embeddings send to and . The given unit is positive at both places, since ; the unit is negative at both. Thus the unit signature map has image
The given ideal class group has order . The second short exact sequence therefore gives
To determine the group structure, retain the ideal that generates the ordinary ideal class group. We have : all generators , and lie in , while
puts in . Since is totally positive, in the narrow ideal class group. Its image in the ordinary ideal class group is nontrivial, so has order exactly .
The class of the principal ideal is a nontrivial element of . Its two signs are , and multiplying by a unit can only reverse both signs or neither, so no generator of this ideal is totally positive. Its square is , which does have a totally positive generator. Thus is another element of order , distinct from because its ordinary ideal class is trivial. These two elements are independent and generate all four classes. Consequently
The nontrivial ordinary ideal class already has a lift of order , so the extension in the second short exact sequence splits; it cannot be cyclic of order .
Put . Then and the field discriminant is . Reduction of modulo and gives
Their ideal norms are , respectively. The Minkowski bound for ideal classes is , so every ideal class has an integral representative of norm at most . The only possible representatives are the unit ideal, , , , and the norm- ideal . Thus there are at most four classes.
The class of is nontrivial, since a principal ideal of norm would require . Also is not principal: norm forces , whose ideal is , not .
Now . It is divisible by and , but not by , as substitution of modulo gives . Unique ideal factorization and norms therefore give . Consequently , a nontrivial class of order . The class of has order , and the four-class bound is attained:
A ring is a Noetherian ring if it satisfies the ascending chain condition on ideals: every chain
eventually becomes constant. Equivalently, every ideal has a finite generating set of an ideal. To see this equivalence, if an ideal were not finitely generated, one could repeatedly choose an element outside the ideal generated by the preceding choices, producing a strictly ascending chain. Conversely, the union of an ascending chain is an ideal; if it is generated by finitely many elements, all of them lie in one term of the chain, and every later term equals that term.
A ring is an Artinian ring if it satisfies the descending chain condition on ideals: every chain
eventually becomes constant. These are stabilization conditions on all ideals, not merely on principal ideals.
The unique factorization of ideals in a Dedekind domain states that every nonzero proper ideal of a Dedekind domain has a factorization
where the are distinct nonzero prime ideals and the are positive integers. The prime ideals and their exponents are unique up to reordering. The unit ideal is the empty product; the zero ideal is excluded.
Write for the prime-ideal valuation in a Dedekind domain, namely the exponent of in this factorization, with zero assigned when is absent. The associated containment rule is
Larger exponents give smaller ideals, just as higher divisibility gives smaller principal ideals in . The theorem concerns unique factorization of ideals; it does not assert unique factorization of elements or that these ideals are principal.
Take
We justify that this is a Dedekind domain. It is an integral domain inside the number field . As an additive group it is free of rank two over . The subgroup theorem for finitely generated abelian groups says that every subgroup of such a group is finitely generated. Thus every ideal has finitely many additive generators, and those same elements generate it as a -ideal. This proves that is Noetherian.
We use the standard formula for the ring of integers of a quadratic field: for squarefree , it is if , and otherwise. Since , is the ring of integers of a number field , meaning all elements of integral over . We also use transitivity of integral extensions. If an element of is integral over , it is integral over because is integral over , and therefore belongs to . Thus is an integrally closed domain.
Every nonzero prime ideal is maximal. Indeed, choose . Multiplying by its algebraic conjugate puts the nonzero integer in . Hence the integral domain is a quotient of the finite ring , and is finite. Every finite integral domain is a field, since multiplication by a nonzero element is injective and therefore surjective. The element has no inverse in , since , so is not a field. Consequently is not maximal, and a maximal ideal above it is nonzero. Together with the preceding result, this gives Krull dimension exactly one.
Finally, consider the ideal
Reduction modulo with identifies with , so the additive index is . If were the principal ideal , multiplication by its nonzero generator would have integer matrix
in the basis . The index of its image is the absolute determinant, so
There are no integer solutions: makes the right side at least , while would require . Thus is a nonprincipal ideal in the integers adjoined a square root of minus five, and is a Dedekind domain that is not a principal ideal domain.
Write and . The map
is a surjective ring homomorphism: in , the image of is and . Its kernel is exactly . Indeed, both generators lie in the kernel; conversely, if is even, then
and is even. Hence and the index of a subgroup is .
If were a principal ideal, multiplication by would identify its additive lattice with a sublattice of index
Thus principality would require . This Diophantine equation has no integer solution: would give , while makes the left side at least . Therefore
Let and . The generator of this principal ideal has norm
Reduction modulo gives . The map below is surjective and has in its kernel; both the kernel and have index seven, the latter by the ideal norm, so they are equal. Hence it induces an isomorphism of residue fields
In particular,
In the finite field , the element has multiplicative order six, since
By part (b), every unit is for and . Since , its residue is , which equals one exactly when
The resulting units are and , and these are precisely the even and odd powers of . Therefore
which is the group of units congruent to one modulo 3 plus square root two.
Distinct prime-power ideals are pairwise comaximal. For comaximal ideals, product equals intersection, so induction gives
The Chinese remainder theorem therefore gives the ring isomorphism
The ideal approximation theorem, proved by applying this Chinese-remainder map one prime power deeper, supplies
Equivalently, at every prime dividing .
Since , the fractional ideal
is an integral ideal and is a principal ideal. At every ,
, so .
Choose and with . Then
. For any ,
Thus
so every ideal of has a generating set of two elements.
False. The module over a ring over itself is Noetherian, because its submodules are the principal ideals , but the descending chain
shows that it is not an Artinian module.
False. The integers form a Noetherian ring, since every ideal is principal, but this ring is not an Artinian ring: the strictly descending chain
never stabilizes.
For an unramified prime , the ideal-theoretic decomposition law gives
Under the Hilbert class field isomorphism, this Artin symbol is the image of . It is trivial exactly when , which means exactly that is a principal ideal.
The product formula says that every satisfies
First suppose that is an algebraic integer. Its principal ideal has the prime ideal factorization
Taking the ideal norm gives
On the other hand, the field norm is the product over embeddings, so
Equating these expressions proves the formula for algebraic integers. Every nonzero element of is a quotient of two algebraic integers, and multiplicativity completes the proof.
Prime ideal factorization Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
Every nonzero ideal of the ring of integers of a number field factors uniquely as a finite product of nonzero prime ideals. Thus each has integer valuations , almost all zero, determined by the factorization of its principal ideal.