Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2009
A subset S of an associative ring R is a uniform insulator for R provided a S b ≠ 0 for any nonzero a, b ∈ R. The ring R is called uniformly strongly prime of bound m if R has uniform insulators and the smallest of those has cardinality m. Here we compute these bounds for matrix rings over fields and obtain refinements of some results of van den Berg in this context.
More precisely, for a field F and a positive integer k, let m be the bound of the matrix ring Mk(F), and let n be dimF(V), where V is a subspace of Mk(F) of maximal dimension with respect to not containing rank one matrices. We show that m + n = k2. This implies, for example, that n = k2 − k if and only if there exists a (nonassociative) division algebra over F of dimension k.