Rings faithfully represented on their left socle

In 1964 A. W. Goldie [1] posed the problem of determining all rings with identity and minimal condition on left ideals which are faithfully represented on the right side of their left socle. Goldie showed that such a ring which is indecomposable and in which the left and right principal indecomposable ideals have, respectively, unique left and unique right composition series is a complete blocked triangular matrix ring over a skewfield. The general problem suggested above is very difficult. We obtain results under certain natural restrictions which are much weaker than the restrictive assumptions made by Goldie. We characterize those rings in which the principal indecomposable left ideals each contain a unique minimal left ideal (Theorem (4.2)). It is sufficient to handle indecomposable rings (Lemma (1.4)). Such a ring is also a blocked triangular matrix ring. There exist r positive integers K 1 ,..., K r such that the i,j th block of a typical matrix is a K i x K j matrix with arbitrary entries in a subgroup D ij of the additive group of a fixed skewfield D. Each D ii is a sub-skewfield of D and D ri = D for all i. Conversely, every matrix ring which has this form is indecomposable, faithfully represented on the right side of its left socle, and possesses the property that every principal indecomposable left ideal contains a unique minimal left ideal. The principal indecomposable left ideals may have unique composition series even though the ring does not have minimal condition on right ideals. We characterize this situation by defining a partial ordering ρ on {i, 2,...,r} where we set iρj if D ij ≠ 0. Every principal indecomposable left ideal has a unique composition series if and only if the diagram of ρ is an inverted tree and every D ij is a one-dimensional left vector space over D ii (Theorem (5.4)). We show (Theorem (2.2)) that every ring A of the type we are studying is a unique subdirect sum of less complex rings A 1 ,...,A s of the same type. Namely, each A i has only one isomorphism class of minimal left ideals and the minimal left ideals of different A i are non-isomorphic as left A-modules. We give (Theorem (2.1)) necessary and sufficient conditions for a ring which is a subdirect sum of rings A i having these properties to be faithfully represented on the right side of its left socle. We show ((4.F), p. 42) that up to technical trivia the rings A i are matrix rings of the form [...]. Each Q j comes from the faithful irreducible matrix representation of a certain skewfield over a fixed skewfield D. The bottom row is filled in by arbitrary elements of D. In Part V we construct an interesting class of rings faithfully represented on their left socle from a given partial ordering on a finite set, given skewfields, and given additive groups. This class of rings contains the ones in which every principal indecomposable left ideal has a unique minimal left ideal. We identify the uniquely determined subdirect summands mentioned above in terms of the given partial ordering (Proposition (5.2)). We conjecture that this technique serves to construct all the rings which are a unique subdirect sum of rings each having the property that every principal-indecomposable left ideal contains a unique minimal left ideal.