This book surveys more than 125 years of aspects of associative algebras, especially ring and module theory. It is the first to probe so extensively such a wealth of historical development. Moreover, the author brings the reader up to date, in particular through his report on the subject in the second half of the twentieth century. Included in the book are certain categorical properties from theorems of Frobenius and Stickelberger on the primary decomposition of finite Abelian groups; Hilbert's basis theorem and his Nullstellensatz, including the modern formulations of the latter by Krull, Goldman, and others; Maschke's theorem on the representation theory of finite groups over a field; and the fundamental theorems of Wedderburn on the structure of finite dimensional algebras and finite skew fields and their extensions by Braver, Kaplansky, Chevalley, Goldie, and others. A special feature of the book is the in-depth study of rings with chain condition on annihilator ideals pioneered by Noether, Artin, and Jacobson and refined and extended by many later mathematicians.
Two of the author's prior works, Algebra: Rings, Modules and Categories, I and II (Springer-Verlag, 1973), are devoted to the development of modern associative algebra and ring and module theory. Those works serve as a foundation for the present survey, which includes a bibliography of over 1,600 references and is exhaustively indexed. In addition to the mathematical survey, the author gives candid and descriptive impressions of the last half of the twentieth century in "Part II: Snapshots of Some Mathematical Friends and Places". Beginning with his teachers and fellow graduate students at the University of Kentucky and at Purdue, Faith discusses his Fulbright-Nato Postdoctoral at Heidelberg and at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, his year as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, and the many acquaintances he met there and in subsequent travels in India, Europe, and most recently, Barcelona. Comments on the first edition: "Researchers in algebra should find it both enjoyable to read and very useful in their work. In all cases, [Faith] cites full references as to the origin and development of the theorem ...I know of no other work in print which does this as thoroughly and as broadly.
" - John O'Neill, University of Detroit at Mercy " 'Part II: Snapshots of Some Mathematical Friends and Places' is wonderful! [It is] a joy to read! Mathematicians of my age and younger will relish reading 'Snapshots'." - James A. Huckaba, University of Missouri-Columbia