A note on finite division rings

Abstract

A celebrated theorem of Wedderburn says that a finite associative division ring is a finite (commutative) field. An elegant proof of this, due to E. Artin [3, p. 72], reduces the problem to showing the reduced (or generic) norm has a nontrivial zero, and then applies the theorem (conjectured by Artin and proved by Chevalley) that a polynomial with coefficients in a finite field and zero constant term has a nontrivial zero in that field if its degree is less than the number of variables. The Wedderburn theorem was generalized by A. A. Albert to finite strictly power-associative division rings of characteristic # 2 in [1, p. 301 ] and [2, p. i1 ] (see also [5 ]). The proof reduced the powerassociative case to the associative case by using the properties of Jordan division algebras. It is the purpose of this note to show that Artin's method carries over directly to the power-associative case using the generic norm introduced by N. Jacobson [4]. By avoiding Jordan algebras one is able to extend Albert's result to the characteristic 2 case. The usual definition of a division ring requires that left and right multiplications by a nonzero element be bijective. If the ring is finite it is necessarily an algebra, over a finite field 4, which is algebraic (even finite-dimensional) and without zero divisors. Also, as we shall see later, the algebra necessarily has a unit element. We wish to consider something slightly more general. For our purposes we say an algebraic power-associative algebra is a division algebra if it is unital and no element xO 0 is a zero divisor in the subalgebra (D[x] it generates (since 4<[x] is finite-dimensional, this is equivalent to saying x is invertible in b [x]). Our conditions are less restrictive, since the Jordan algebra of a quadratic form can be a division algebra in our sense with zero divisors. With this definition we have