The Quotient Problem for Noetherian Rings

Abstract

Our work was motivated by attempts to find a criterion for the existence of a classical quotient ring, for a noetherian ring, in analogy with the various known criteria for the existence of an artinian classical quotient ring ([9], [10], [13], [2]).We have restricted our attention to Krull symmetric noetherian rings R, and we make heavy use of the fact that all their Krull composition factors are non-singular (Proposition 7). The collection Kprime R of the associated primes of the Krull composition factors of R plays a central role, taking the place of the collection of the associated primes of R.