A question about fields and separability in Serre's "Local Fields"

191 Views Asked by At

On page 14 of the English edition of Serre's "Local Fields", that is chapter 1, section 4, I am confused by the following; there is talk of fields $B/\mathfrak P$ and $A/\mathfrak p$ for prime ideals $\mathfrak P$ of a ring $B$ and $\mathfrak p$ of a ring $A.$ Surely that would require $\mathfrak P$ and $\mathfrak p$ to be maximal ideals? Also in the next paragraph there is talk of the extension $B/\mathfrak P$ of $A/\mathfrak p$ being separable, which is a concept I know only for field extensions. So how should I interpret all of this? Thanks for any help!

1

There are 1 best solutions below

1
On BEST ANSWER

Right before that he says

Let us keep the hypotheses of prop. 9. If $\mathfrak{P}$ is a non-zero prime ideal of $B$...

Proposition 9 says

Proposition 9. If $A$ is Dedekind then $B$ is Dedekind.

and in a Dedekind domain, every non-zero prime ideal is maximal. Thus $\mathfrak{P}$ and $\mathfrak{p}=\mathfrak{P}\cap A$ are indeed maximal, and thus $B/\mathfrak{P}$ and $A/\mathfrak{p}$ are indeed fields.


But I'll also note that there is a notion of separability for ring extensions; see The Separable Galois Theory of Commutative Rings for example.