A common theme in ring theory is the idea that we identify a property of the integers, and work out what that property means in a more general setting. The idea of the Euclidean_domain captures the fact that in , we may perform the division_algorithm (which can then be used to work out greatest common divisors and other such nice things from ). Here, we will prove that this simple property actually imposes a lot of structure on a ring: it forces the ring to be a principal ideal domain, so that every ideal has just one generator.
In turn, this forces the ring to have unique factorisation (proof), so in some sense the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (i.e. the statement that is a unique factorisation domain) is true entirely because the division algorithm works in .
This result is essentially why we care about Euclidean domains: because if we know a Euclidean function for an integral domain, we have a very easy way of recognising that the ring is a principal ideal domain.
Let be a Euclidean_domain. Then is a principal ideal domain.
This proof essentially mirrors the first proof one might find in the concrete case of the integers, if one sat down to discover an integer-specific proof; but we cast it into slightly different language using an equivalent definition of "ideal", because it is a bit cleaner that way. It is a very useful exercise to work through the proof, using instead of the general ring and using "size" [1] as the Euclidean function.
Let be a Euclidean domain, and say is a Euclidean function. That is,
We need to show that every ideal is principal, so take an ideal . We'll view as the kernel of a homomorphism ; recall that this is the proper way to think of ideals. (Proof of the equivalence.) Then we need to show that there is some such that if and only if is a multiple of .
If only sends to (that is, everything else doesn't get sent to ), then we're immediately done: just let .
Otherwise, sends something nonzero to ; choose to be nonzero with minimal . We claim that this works.
Indeed, let be a multiple of , so we can write it as , say. Then . Therefore multiples of are sent by to .
Conversely, if is not a multiple of , then we can write where and is nonzero. [2] Then ; we already have , so . But has a smaller -value than does, and we picked to have the smallest -value among everything that sent to ; so cannot be , and hence nor can .
So we have shown that if and only if is a multiple of , as required.
There do exist principal ideal domains which are not Euclidean domains: is an example. (Proof.)