Weakly Special Classes of Semiprime Rings

This paper investigates closure properties possessed by certain classes of finite subdirect products of prime rings. If ℳ is a special class of prime rings then the class ℳ_∞ of all finite subdirect products of rings in ℳ is shown to be weakly special. A ring S is said to be a right tight extension resp. tight extension] of a subring R if every nonzero right ideal resp. right ideal and left ideal] of S meets R nontrivially. Every hereditary class of semiprime rings closed under tight extensions is weakly special. Each of the following conditions imposed on a semiprime ring yields a hereditary class closed under right tight extensions: ACC on right annihilators; finite right Goldie dimension; right Goldie. The class of all finite subdirect products of uniformly strongly prime rings is shown to be closed under tight extensions, answering a published question. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.