On (von Neumann) regular rings

Abstract

Throughout, A denotes an associative ring with identity and “module” means “left, unitary A-module”. In (3), it is proved that A is semi-simple, Artinian if A is a semi-prime ring such that every left ideal is a left annihilator. A natural question is whether a similar result holds for a (von Neumann) regular ring. The first proposition of this short note is that if A contains no non-zero nilpotent element, then A is regular iff every principal left ideal is the left annihilator of an element of A. It is well-known that a commutative ring is regular iff every simple module is injective (I. Kaplansky, see (2, p. 130)). The second proposition here is a partial generalisation of that result.