Past exam of the commutative algebra course of the University of Oxford 2017 2 c Solution 2026-10-25
Fix and suppose, for a contradiction, that . Set . Since is a Noetherian ring, this ideal is a finitely generated module, say . It is nonzero: if , then because is an integral domain.
The equality allows us to writeLet and . Then . The adjugate matrix identity implies that annihilates every . In the determinant expansion of , the constant term is and every other term contains an entry of , soThis is the determinant trick. Since some , multiplicative cancellation in an integral domain gives . But then , contradicting . We have proved the strict descent of powers of a nonzero proper ideal in a Noetherian domain:All these powers of an ideal have the same radical of an ideal. Indeed, gives . Conversely, if , then , so . Thusand gives infinitely many distinct ideals with the prescribed radical of an ideal. If the convention is used, the additional inequality follows immediately from properness.