Tuesday, 10 February 2009

ac.commutative algebra - An example of two elements without a greatest common divisor

It deserves to be much better known that nonexistant GCDs (and, similarly, nonprincipal ideals)
arise immediately from any failure of Euclid's Lemma, and this provides an illuminating way to view many of the standard examples. Below is a detailed explanation extracted from one of my sci.math.research posts [2]. The results below hold true in any domain D.



LEMMA: (a,b) = (ac,bc)/c if (ac,bc) exists



Proof: d|a,b <=> dc|ac,bc <=> dc|(ac,bc) <=> d|(ac,bc)/c. QED



EUCLID'S LEMMA: a|bc and (a,b)=1 => a|c, if (ac,bc) exists



Proof: a|ac,bc => a|(ac,bc) = (a,b)c = c via Lemma. QED



Therefore if a,b,c fail to satisfy the implication in Euclid's Lemma,
namely if (a,b) = 1 and a|bc, not a|c, then one
immediately deduces that the gcd (ac,bc) fails to exist in D.



E.g. David Speyer's example above, and Khurana's example in [1] (= Theorem 31 in Pete L. Clark's [0]) are simply specializations where a,b,c = p,1+w,1-w in a quadratic number (sub)ring Z[w], ww = -d.



[0] Clark, Pete. L. Factorization in integral domains. 29pp. 2009.
http://math.uga.edu/~pete/factorization.pdf



[1] D. Khurana, On GCD and LCM in domains: A Conjecture of Gauss.
Resonance 8 (2003), 72-79.
http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/June2003/pdf/June2003Classroom.pdf



[2] sci.math.research, 3/12/09, seeking comments on expository article on factorization
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.research/msg/88343de90a4cf6b7
http://google.com/groups?selm=gparte%24si4%241%40dizzy.math.ohio-state.edu

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