AN INTERNAL CHARACTERIZATION OF STRUCTURAL MATRIX-RINGS

It is known that structural matrix rings provide a natural passage from complete matrix rings to upper and lower triangular matrix rings, and they often explain the peculiarities regarding certain properties of complete matrix rings on the one hand and of triangular matrix rings on the other hand. In this paper the concept of a set of matrix units in a ring associated with a quasi-order relation is introduced and used to provide an internal characterisation of structural matrix rings.