Artinian Meadows

Abstract

We introduce the notion of Artinian meadow as an algebraic structure constructed from an Artinian ring which is also a common meadow, i.e.\ a commutative and associative structure with two operations (addition and multiplication) with additive and multiplicative identities and for which inverses are total. The inverse of zero in a common meadow is an error term $a$ which is absorbent for addition. We show that, in analogy with what happens with commutative unital Artinian rings, Artinian meadows decompose as a product of local meadows in an essentially unique way. We also provide a canonical way to construct meadows from unital commutative rings.