subdirect product of rings
A ring is said to be (represented as) a subdirect product of a family of rings if:
- 1.
there is a monomorphism

, and
- 2.
given 1., is surjective
for each , where is the canonical projection map.
A subdirect product () of is said to be trivial if one of the is an isomorphism![]()
.
Direct products![]()
and direct sums
![]()
of rings are all examples of subdirect products of rings. does not have non-trivial direct product nor non-trivial direct sum of rings. However, can be represented as a non-trivial subdirect product of .
As an application of subdirect products, it can be shown that any ring can be represented as a subdirect product of subdirectly irreducible rings. Since a subdirectly commutative reduced ring is a field, a Boolean ring
![]()
can be represented as a subdirect product of . Furthermore, if this Boolean ring is finite, the subdirect product becomes a direct product . Consequently, has elements, where is the number of copies of .