Serial Rings

The main theme in classical ring theory is the structure theory of rings of a particular kind. For example, no one text book in ring theory could miss the Wedderburn-Artin theorem, which says that a ring R is semisimple Artinian iffR is isomorphic to a finite direct sum of full matrix rings over skew fields. This is an example of a finiteness condition which, at least historically, has dominated i...