Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
We assume that the reader is familiar with the program of “reverse mathematics” and the development of countable algebra in subsystems of second order arithmetic. The subsystems we are using in this paper are RCA0, WKL0 and ACA0. (The reader who wants to learn about them should study [1].) In [1] it was shown that the statement “Every countable commutative ring has a prime ideal” is equivalent to Weak Konig's Lemma over RCA0, while the statement “Every countable commutative ring has a maximal ideal” is equivalent to Arithmetic Comprehension over RCA0. Our main result in this paper is that the statement “Every countable commutative ring has a minimal prime ideal” is equivalent to Arithmetic Comprehension over RCA0. Minimal prime ideals play an important role in the study of countable commutative rings; see [2, pp. 1–7].