Prime avoidance lemma
This article is about the statement of a simple but indispensable lemma in commutative algebra
View other indispensable lemmata
Contents
Statement
Let be a commutative unital ring. Let
and
be ideals of
, such that
. Then, if
contains an infinite field or if at most two of the
s are not prime, then
is contained in one of the
s.
Graded version
If is graded, and
is generated by homogeneous elements of positive degree, then it suffices to assume that the homogeneous elements of
are contained in
. However, we need to add the further assumption that all the
s are prime.
Importance
The prime avoidance lemma is useful for establishing dichotomies; in particular, if is an ideal which is not cintained in any of the
s, then
has an element which is contained in none of the
s.
Proof
If the ring contains an infinite field
In this case, the proof boils down to two observations:
- Any ideal of the ring is also a vector space over the infinite field
- A vector space over an infinite field cannot be expressed as a union of finitely many proper subspaces
If at most two of the ideals are not prime
The proof in this case proceeds by induction. The crucial ingredients to the proof are:
- If two of the three elements
belong to an ideal, so does the third (the fact that ideals are additive subgroups)
- If, for a product
, any
belongs to an ideal, so does the product
- If a product
belongs to a prime ideal, then one of the
s also belongs to that prime ideal
We now describe the proof by induction. The case requires no proof; the case
follows from observation 1 (in other words, we only need to use that both are additive subgroups). Namely, suppose
is not a subset of either
or
. Pick
and
. Clearly,
. Then
is in
, hence it must be inside
or
. This contradicts observation 1. Further information: Union of two subgroups is not a subgroup
For , we use induction. Suppose, without loss of generality, that
is a prime ideal. Also assume without loss of generality that
is not contained in the union of any proper subcollection of
(otherwise, induction applies). Thus, we can pick
for each
. Clearly
.
We now consider the element:
This is in , hence it must be in one of the
s. We consider two cases:
- The sum is in
: Then, by observation 1,
. By observation 3,
for some
, a contradiction.
- The sum is in
for some
: Observation 2 tells us that
, so observation 1 yields
, a contradiction
In the graded case
In this case, the proof is the same, except that we can now get started on the proof only after raising and
to positive powers so that the new terms have equal degrees, and can be added. In this case, we need all the
s to be prime to ensure that even after taking powers, the elements
still avoid the ideals
, for
.