PID's factor rings have finite amount of principal ideals.
Hey, I have a quick question about Principal Ideal Domains and Ideals.
Let
be a ring that is a Principal Ideal Domain (Integral domain such that all ideals are principals.), and
be an ideal of
.
I must show that there is a finite number of ideals of
, and that they are all principal.
Showing they are principal is quite easy. However I'm having problems with showing there is a finite number of them.
What I've done so far;
Suppose the number of distinct ideals of
is infinite. If there exists an infinite chain
of ideals of
, I can easily show this leads to a contradiction from the fact that
is a PID.
It seems to me that an infinity of ideals would necessarily imply an infinite chain (intuitively), since any ideal of
is going to be of the form
, where
is contained in
, but I can't find a way to either prove of disprove this claim.
Re: PID's factor rings have finite amount of principal ideals.
if and only if
for some
. so
is a factor of
and obviously the number of factors of a nonzero element in a PID is finite.