Just as groups act on sets, rings act on Abelian groups. When a ring acts on an Abelian group, that Abelian group is called a module over the ring.
When a group acts on a set, it must act by bijections, and therefore it must preserve properties such as the cardinality of the set. But when a ring acts on an Abelian group, it respects the additive structure inside the Abelian group. This is condition (1) in the definition below.
In this setting, we will build all the definitions of module algebra in much the same way as we did for groups.
Definition 17.1 Let be a ring and let be an Abelian group. A left action of on is a function
such that for all and :
(1) .
(2) .
(3) .
(4) .
Once a left action of on is specified, we call a left -module.
Definition 16.1 A commutative ring is called a field if
is a group under multiplication.
You might think as follows: if is a “normal” subring, then should be some kind of ring. This is a blind analogy with groups. However, this analogy is wrong.
Definition 15.1 Let be a commutative ring. A subset is called an ideal if
(1) is a subgroup under addition, and
(2) implies for every .
Definition 14.1 A monoid is a group without inverses. That is, a monoid is a set together with a function
which has an identity element and is associative. We call a monoid commutative if
for all .
We have already seen that the orbit-stabilizer theorem can answer some nontrivial questions. For example: how large is the symmetry group of a tetrahedron?
Recall that the theorem says that for any group acting on a set , and any element , there is a bijection
In particular, if is finite, then
Counting theorems of this kind are extremely useful in mathematics. They are like a “layup” in basketball—the easiest way to score. Once you reduce a difficult problem to a counting problem, you have made progress.