Most of the rings one encounters as 'basic examples' satisfy the
'Invariant Basis Number' property: for every pair of positive integers
m and n, if the free left R-modules RR(m)
and RR(n)
are isomorphic, then m=n. There are, however, many important classes
of rings which do not have this property. While at first glance such
rings might seem pathological, in fact they arise quite naturally in a
number of contexts (e.g. as endomorphism rings of infinite dimensional
vector spaces), and possess a significant (perhaps surprising) amount
of structure. In this presentation we describe a class of such rings, the
(now-classical) Leavitt algebras, and then describe their recently
developed generalizations, the Leavitt path algebras. One of the
nice aspects of this subject is that pictorial representations (using graphs)
of the algebras are readily available. In addition, there are strong connections
between these algebraic structures and a class of C*-algebras
(the 'Cuntz-Krieger graph C*-algebras'), a connection which is currently
the subject of great interest to both algebraists and analysts.
|