I'll check out the reference. If it makes the situation any better the ring is a quotient of a polynomial ring over a finite field.
On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 3:03:45 PM UTC-4, JamesHDavenport wrote: > > I would doubt it very much. I imagine the same techniques as Fr\"ohlich,A. > & Shepherdson,J.C., Effective Procedures in Field Theory. Phil, Trans. Roy. > Soc. Ser. A 248(1955-6) pp. 407-432, can be used to construct a ring which > has nontrivial idempotents iss we can determine membership in a recursively > enumerable sequence. I think you would need to know how the ring was > constructed. > > On Tuesday, 17 April 2012 19:37:29 UTC+1, diophan wrote: >> >> Is there any way in sage to determine if a commutative ring with unity R >> has any idempotents other than 0 or 1? My R's have infinitely many elements >> so squaring all the elements isn't going to work. This is equivalent to R >> being isomorphic to a product of two non-trivial rings. >> >> -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
