prime spectrum of a ring: A survey

This thesis has as its motivation the exploration, on an informal level, of a correspondence between Algebra and Topology. Specifically, it considers the prime spectrum of a ring, that is, the set of prime ideals, endowed with the Zariski topology. Questions posed by M. Atiyah and I. MacDonald in their book, "Introduction to Commutative Algebra", serve as a guideline through most of this work. The final section, however, follows R. Heitmann's paper, "Generating Non-Noetherian Modules Efficiently". This section examines the patch topology on the prime spectrum of a ring where the patch topology has as a closed subbasis the Zariski closed and Zariski quasi-compact open sets. It is proven that the prime spectrum of a ring with the patch topology is a compact Hausdorff space, and several relationships between the patch and Zariski topologies are established. The final section concludes with a technical theorem having a number of interesting corollaries, among which are a stable range theorem and a theorem of Kronecker, both generalized to the non-Noetherian setting.