Constructive Commutative Algebra

Commutative Algebra: Constructive Methods

Translated from the popular French edition, this book offers a detailed introduction to various basic concepts, methods, principles, and results of commutative algebra. It takes a constructive viewpoint in commutative algebra and studies algorithmic approaches alongside several abstract classical theories. Indeed, it revisits these traditional topics with a new and simplifying manner, making the subject both accessible and innovative. The algorithmic aspects of such naturally abstract topics as Galois theory, Dedekind rings, Prüfer rings, finitely generated projective modules, dimension theory of commutative rings, and others in the current treatise, are all analysed in the spirit of the great developers of constructive algebra in the nineteenth century. This updated and revised edition contains over 350 well-arranged exercises, together with their helpful hints for solution. A basic knowledge of linear algebra, group theory, elementary number theory as well as the fundamentals of ring and module theory is required. Commutative Algebra: Constructive Methods will be useful for graduate students, and also researchers, instructors and theoretical computer scientists.

Constructive Commutative Algebra

The main goal of this book is to find the constructive content hidden in abstract proofs of concrete theorems in Commutative Algebra, especially in well-known theorems concerning projective modules over polynomial rings (mainly the Quillen-Suslin theorem) and syzygies of multivariate polynomials with coefficients in a valuation ring. Simple and constructive proofs of some results in the theory of projective modules over polynomial rings are also given, and light is cast upon recent progress on the Hermite ring and Gröbner ring conjectures. New conjectures on unimodular completion arising from our constructive approach to the unimodular completion problem are presented. Constructive algebra can be understood as a first preprocessing step for computer algebra that leads to the discovery of general algorithms, even if they are sometimes not efficient. From a logical point of view, the dynamical evaluation gives a constructive substitute for two highly nonconstructive tools of abstract algebra: the Law of Excluded Middle and Zorn's Lemma. For instance, these tools are required in order to construct the complete prime factorization of an ideal in a Dedekind ring, whereas the dynamical method reveals the computational content of this construction. These lecture notes follow this dynamical philosophy.

Constructive Commutative Algebra in Nonlinear Control Theory