On Continuous Regular Rings and Semisimple Self Injective Rings

Abstract

Brainerd and Lambek (2, Corollary 4) have proved recently that any complete Boolean ring is self-injective. It is easy to see that every complete Boolean ring is a continuous regular ring, that is, a regular ring of which the lattice of principal left ideals is continuous. This suggests that in a continuous regular ring it might be possible to prove the injectivity. However, a simple example (Example 3) shows that the conjecture is not true in general. Our main theorem is the following. Every continuous regular ring with no ideals of index 1 is (both left and right) self-injective (Theorem 3).It is known to Wolfson (13, Theorem 5.1) and Zelinsky (15) that the ring S of all linear transformations of a vector space of dimension ≥ 2 over a division ring is generated by idempotents and also by non-singular elements.