In a 1968 issue of the Proceedings, P. M. Cohn famously claimed that a commutative domain is atomic if and only if it satisfies the ascending chain condition on principal ideals (ACCP). Some years later, a counterexample was however provided by A. Grams, who showed that every commutative domain with the ACCP is atomic, but not vice versa. This has led to the problem of finding a sensible (ideal-theoretic) characterisation of atomicity.

The question (explicitly stated on p. 3 of A. Geroldinger and F. Halter–Koch’s 2006 monograph on factorisation) is still open. We settle it here by using the language of monoids and preorders.

A ring is called right annelidan if the right annihilator of any subset of the ring is comparable with every other right ideal. In this paper we develop the connections between this class of rings and the classes of right Bézout rings and rings whose right ideals form a distributive lattice. We obtain results on localization of right annelidan rings at prime ideals, chain conditions that entail left-right symmetry of the annelidan condition, and construction of completely prime ideals.

Let $R$ be a ring and $M_R$ be an $R$-module. We characterize the existence of ${\rm Add} M$-covers and ${\rm Add} M$-envelopes in terms of finiteness conditions of $M$ over its endomorphism ring. We then present some applications related to the existence of well-behaved direct sum decompositions for direct products of copies of $M$. Our results can be viewed as natural extensions of classical theorems of Bass and Chase on coherent and perfect rings.

We prove that if φ is an (anti-) automorphism of a ring R with finite orbits on R, or integral over the integers, and if R contains a finite maximal φ-invariant subring, then R must be finite. Special cases are when φ has finite order or is an involution. Two corollaries are that R must be finite when R contains only finitely many φ-invariant subrings or has both ascending and descending chain conditions on φ invariant subrings. These generalize results in the literature for the special case when φ = idR.

Let R be any ring with identity, M a unital right R-module and α ≥ 0 an ordinal. Then M is a direct sum of a semisimple module and a module having Krull dimension at most α if and only if for every submodule N of M there exists a direct summand K of M such that K ⊆ N and N/K has Krull dimension at most α.

Let R be a ring and M a right R-module. Let σ[M] be the full subcategory of Mod-R subgenerated by M. An M-natural class 𝒦 is a subclass of σ[M] closed under submodules, direct sums, isomorphic copies, and M-injective hulls. We present some equivalent conditions each of which describes when σ has the property that direct sums of (M-)injective modules in σ are (M-)injective. Specializing to particular M, and/or special subclasses we obtain many new results and known results as corollaries.