On the small and essential ideals in certain classes of rings

Abstract

AbstractIt is well known that for a ring with identity the Brown-McCoy radical is the maximal small ideal. However, in certain subrings of complete matrix rings, which we call structural matrix rings, the maximal small and minimal essential ideals coincide.In this paper we characterize a class of commutative and a class of non-commutative rings for which this coincidence occurs, namely quotients of Prüfer domains and structural matrix rings over Brown-McCoy semisimple rings. A similarity between these two classes is obtained.