NOTES ON LIE IDEALS OF SIMPLE ARTINIAN RINGS

Abstract

Let R be a ring. If we replace the original associative product of R with their canonic Lie product, or [a, b] = ab - ba for every a, b in R, then R would be a Lie ring. With this new product the additive commutator subgroup of R or [R, R] is a Lie subring of R. Herstein has shown that in a simple ring R with characteristic unequal to 2, any Lie ideal of R either is contained in Z(R), the center of R or contains [R, R]. He also showed that in this situation the Lie ring [R, R]/Z[R, R] is simple. We give an alternative matrix proof of these results for the special case of simple artinian rings and show that in this case the characteristic condition can be more restricted.