Sheaves that fail to represent matrix rings

There are two fundamental obstructions to representing noncommutative rings via sheaves. First, there is no subcanonical coverage on the opposite of the category of rings that includes all covering families in the big Zariski site. Second, there is no contravariant functor F from the category of rings to the category of ringed categories whose composite with the global sections functor is naturally isomorphic to the identity, such that F restricts to the Zariski spectrum functor Spec on the category of commutative rings (in a compatible way with the natural isomorphism). Both of these no-go results are proved by restricting attention to matrix rings.Comment: 13 pages; final versio

A prime ideal principle for two-sided ideals

Many classical ring-theoretic results state that an ideal that is maximal with respect to satisfying a special property must be prime. We present a "Prime Ideal Principle" that gives a uniform method of proving such facts, generalizing the Prime Ideal Principle for commutative rings due to T.Y. Lam and the author. Old and new "maximal implies prime" results are presented, with results touching on annihilator ideals, polynomial identity rings, the Artin-Rees property, Dedekind-finite rings, principal ideals generated by normal elements, strongly noetherian algebras, and just infinite algebras.Comment: 22 page

On discretization of C*-algebras

The C*-algebra of bounded operators on the separable infinite-dimensional Hilbert space cannot be mapped to a W*-algebra in such a way that each unital commutative C*-subalgebra C(X) factors normally through $\ell^\infty(X)$. Consequently, there is no faithful functor discretizing C*-algebras to AW*-algebras, including von Neumann algebras, in this way.Comment: 5 pages. Please note that arXiv:1607.03376 supersedes this paper. It significantly strengthens the main results and includes positive results on discretization of C*-algebra

Skew Calabi-Yau Algebras and Homological Identities

A skew Calabi-Yau algebra is a generalization of a Calabi-Yau algebra which allows for a non-trivial Nakayama automorphism. We prove three homological identities about the Nakayama automorphism and give several applications. The identities we prove show (i) how the Nakayama automorphism of a smash product algebra A # H is related to the Nakayama automorphisms of a graded skew Calabi-Yau algebra A and a finite-dimensional Hopf algebra H that acts on it; (ii) how the Nakayama automorphism of a graded twist of A is related to the Nakayama automorphism of A; and (iii) that Nakayama automorphism of a skew Calabi-Yau algebra A has trivial homological determinant in case A is noetherian, connected graded, and Koszul.Comment: 39 pages; minor changes, mostly in the Introductio

Skew Calabi-Yau triangulated categories and Frobenius Ext-algebras

We investigate the conditions that are sufficient to make the Ext-algebra of an object in a (triangulated) category into a Frobenius algebra and compute the corresponding Nakayama automorphism. As an application, we prove the conjecture that hdet($\mu_A$) = 1 for any noetherian Artin-Schelter regular (hence skew Calabi-Yau) algebra A.Comment: 31 page