Closure Operations on Ideals in Commutative Rings

Neil Epstein
Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan

Abstract: A closure operation is an idempotent endomorphism on the set of ideals of a given ring, which produces an ideal that contains the given ideal, and preserves containment of ideals. If defined element-wise, a closure operation can be seen as a necessary condition for membership in an ideal. I will discuss various closure operations (e.g. radical, integral closure, saturation, continuous closure), as well as some of their properties and how they arise.