show/hide this revision's text 3 tags
show/hide this revision's text 2 edited title

Can an infinite communative commutative ring have a finite (but nonzero) number of non-nilpotent zero-divisors?

show/hide this revision's text 1

Can an infinite communative ring have a finite (but nonzero) number of non-nilpotent zero-divisors?

By a theorem of Ganesan, if a commutative ring not a domain has only finitely many zero-divisors, then the ring must be finite. (There are analogous results for non-commutative rings.)

There are plenty of examples of infinite rings with a finite number of nonzero nilpotents. There are also plenty of examples of infinite rings with an infinite number of zero-divisors, all of which are nilpotent.

However, I am unaware of any ring with an infinite number of zero-divisors, of which $0 < n < \infty$ are non-nilpotent.

Can anyone give an example or explain why this can't happen. I am mostly interested in the commutative case, but non-commutative examples would be interesting too.