Prime ideal need not contain any prime element
Statement
It is possible to have an integral domain and a nonzero prime ideal of such that does not contain any prime element of .
Related facts
- Unique factorization implies every nonzero prime ideal contains a prime element
- Unique factorization and one-dimensional iff principal ideal
- Unique factorization and finite-dimensional implies every prime ideal is generated by a set of primes of size at most the dimension
Proof
For an example, we can take any Dedekind domain that is not a principal ideal domain, and pick a prime ideal in the Dedekind domain that is not principal. A concrete example is:
.