The almost isomorphism relation for simple regular rings

Abstract

A longstanding open problem in the theory of von Neumann regular rings is the question of whether every directly finite simple regular ring must be unit-regular. Recent work on this problem has been done by P. Menal, K. C. O'Meara, and the authors. To clarify some aspects of these new developments, we introduce and study the notion of almost isomorphism between finitely generated projective modules over a simple regular ring.