In: Advanced Math
Let F be a field and R = Mn(F) the ring of n×n matrices with entires in F. Prove that R has no two sided ideals except (0) and (1).
Let
be a two sided ideal in
. We show that
where
denotes the
identity matrix. Since
, there exists a nonzero matrix
. Let
. Then, by applying some elementary row and column operations on
we can transform it to
Since the elementary row operations are applied just by
multiplying
by an elementary matrix on left and a column operation by
multiplying
by an elementary operation on right, we get there exist elementary
matrices
such that
and this shows that
since
is a two sided ideal in
.
Now just by multiplying
by permutation matrices on left and then on right we get that
contains several matrices having
and
on diagonal and all other entries
and by adding some of them we get that
contains a digonal matrix having all diagonal entries nonzero.
Now, if we just multiply that diagonal matrix by an appropriate
diagonal matrix, we get that
contains the identity matrix
and hence it contains al the matrices from
which shows that