How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
The prime ideals of a field and of the integers
Example
Let be a field.
- .
- The prime ideals of are exactly and for prime integers .
Thus the inclusion order on has for each prime number , and no other strict containments.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A field and the ring .
Every nonempty subset of the natural numbers has a least element (The well-ordering principle).
For a commutative ring, the quotient by an ideal is an integral domain exactly when that ideal is prime ( is an integral domain if and only if is a prime ideal).
For a prime integer , the quotient ring is a field (For every prime , the two operations on make it a field).
For integers and positive integers , there are integers with and (Division with remainder in : for and there are unique with and ).
Verification
A proper ideal of a field cannot contain a nonzero element, because any such element is a unit and would force into the ideal. Hence the only proper ideal of is , and is prime because has no zero divisors.
Let . If , choose the least positive integer using [L1]. For any , [L4] gives with ; since and was the least positive element of , one must have , so every element of is a multiple of and therefore .
If with , then in while neither factor is zero, so [L2] shows is not prime. If is prime, then [L3] makes a field and hence a domain, so [L2] shows is prime. Finally is prime because is an integral domain.
Steps 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 prove the listed prime ideals of and , and the inclusion order is immediate because every nonzero prime ideal of is maximal.
Depends on
- The well-ordering principle
- Division with remainder in $\mathbb{Z}$: for $a \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $b > 0$ there are unique $q, r \in \mathbb{Z}$ with $a = qb + r$ and $0 \le r < b$
- $R/P$ is an integral domain if and only if $P$ is a prime ideal
- For every prime $p$, the two operations on $\mathbb{Z}/p$ make it a field
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · two levels
31 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- J. S. Milne, A Primer of Commutative Algebra, v4.03, §14 The spectrum of a ring (standard reference, not scraped)
- A. Altman and S. Kleiman, A Term of Commutative Algebra, 13th ed., §13 and §17 (standard reference, not scraped)