Up to an operation-preserving bijection, there are two rngs with two elements. Write the elements as . The additive abelian group must satisfy . The distributive property forces all products involving zero to vanish, leaving only the choice or . The first gives a zero-multiplication rng; the second gives the prime field , with identity . Both satisfy the axioms, and they are not isomorphic because an isomorphism must send the unique nonzero element to the unique nonzero element and preserve its square. In particular, there is just one unital ring with two elements.
Articles by others on the same topic
There are currently no matching articles.