Identities of Non-Associative Algebras

Abstract

In the first part of this paper we define a partial ordering on the set of all homogeneous identities and find necessary and sufficient conditions that an identity does not imply any identity lower than it in the partial ordering (we call such an identity irreducible). Perhaps the most interesting property established for irreducible identities is that they are skew-symmetric in any two variables of the same odd degree and symmetric in any two variables of the same even degree. The results of the first section are applied to commutative algebras in the remainder of the paper.