The Köthe conjecture states that if a ring R has no nonzero nil ideals then R has no nonzero nil one-sided ideals. Although for more than 70 years significant progress has been made, it is still open in general. In this paper we survey some results related to the Köthe conjecture as well as some equivalent problems.
Let F be a field, and let R be a finitely-generated F-algebra, which is a domain with quadratic growth. It is shown that either the center of R is a finitely-generated F-algebra or R satisfies a polynomial identity (is PI) or else R is algebraic over F. Let r ∈ R be not algebraic over F and let C be the centralizer of r. It is shown that either the quotient ring of C is a finitely-generated division algebra of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension 1 or R is PI.
We show that the family of all lines in the plane which is a VC class of index 2 cannot be obtained in a finite number of steps starting with VC classes of index 1 and applying the operations of intersection and union. This confirms a common belief among specialists and solves a question asked by several authors.
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