Self-injective von Neumann regular rings and Köthe's Conjecture

Abstract

One of the many equivalent formulation of the Köthe's conjecture is the assertion that there exists no ring which contains two nil right ideals whose sum is not nil. We discuss several consequences of an observation that if the Koethe conjecture fails then there exists a counterexample in the form of a countable local subring of a suitable self-injective prime (von Neumann) regular ring.