In a 1968 issue of the Proceedings, P. M. Cohn famously claimed that a commutative domain is atomic if and only if it satisfies the ascending chain condition on principal ideals (ACCP). Some years later, a counterexample was however provided by A. Grams, who showed that every commutative domain with the ACCP is atomic, but not vice versa. This has led to the problem of finding a sensible (ideal-theoretic) characterisation of atomicity.

The question (explicitly stated on p. 3 of A. Geroldinger and F. Halter–Koch’s 2006 monograph on factorisation) is still open. We settle it here by using the language of monoids and preorders.

Let $X$ be a nonempty set and ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ the power set of $X$. The aim of this paper is to identify the unital subrings of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ and to compute its cardinality when it is finite. It is proved that any topology $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}$ on $X$ such that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}^{c}$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}^{c}=\{U^{c}\mid U\in \unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}\}$, is a unital subring of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$. It is also shown that $X$ is finite if and only if any unital subring of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ is a topology $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}$ on $X$ such that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}^{c}$ if and only if the set of unital subrings of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ is finite. As a consequence, if $X$ is finite with cardinality $n\geq 2$, then the number of unital subrings of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ is equal to the $n$th Bell number and the supremum of the lengths of chains of unital subalgebras of ${\mathcal{P}}(X)$ is equal to $n-1$.

Let $R$ be a commutative Noetherian ring of prime characteristic $p$. In this paper, we give a short proof using filter regular sequences that the set of associated prime ideals of $H_{I}^{t}(R)$ is finite for any ideal $I$ and for any $t\geqslant 0$ when $R$ has finite $F$-representation type or finite singular locus. This extends a previous result by Takagi–Takahashi and gives affirmative answers for a problem of Huneke in many new classes of rings in positive characteristic. We also give a criterion about the singularities of $R$ (in any characteristic) to guarantee that the set $\operatorname{Ass}H_{I}^{2}(R)$ is always finite.

Let $R\subset F$ be an extension of real closed fields, and let ${\mathcal{S}}(M,R)$ be the ring of (continuous) semialgebraic functions on a semialgebraic set $M\subset R^{n}$. We prove that every $R$-homomorphism ${\it\varphi}:{\mathcal{S}}(M,R)\rightarrow F$ is essentially the evaluation homomorphism at a certain point $p\in F^{n}$ adjacent to the extended semialgebraic set $M_{F}$. This type of result is commonly known in real algebra as a substitution lemma. In the case when $M$ is locally closed, the results are neat, while the non-locally closed case requires a more subtle approach and some constructions (weak continuous extension theorem, appropriate immersion of semialgebraic sets) that have interest of their own. We consider the same problem for the ring of bounded (continuous) semialgebraic functions, getting results of a different nature.

It is shown that the well-known characterizations of when a commutative ring R has Noetherian spectrum carry over to characterizations of when the set Spec(M) of prime submodules of a finitely generated module M is Noetherian. The symmetric algebra SR(M) of M is used to show that the Noetherian property of Spec(R), and some related properties, pass from the ring R to the finitely generated R-modules.