Morita equivalence

In abstract algebra, Morita equivalence is a relationship defined between rings that preserves many ring-theoretic properties. It is named after Japanese mathematician Kiiti Morita who defined equivalence and a similar notion of duality in 1958.

Rings are commonly studied in terms of their modules, as modules can be viewed as representations of rings. Every ring R has a natural R-module structure on itself where the module action is defined as the multiplication in the ring, so the approach via modules is more general and gives useful information. Because of this, one often studies a ring by studying the category of modules over that ring. Morita equivalence takes this viewpoint to a natural conclusion by defining rings to be Morita equivalent if their module categories are equivalent. This notion is of interest only when dealing with noncommutative rings, since it can be shown that two commutative rings are Morita equivalent if and only if they are isomorphic.

Two rings R and S (associative, with 1) are said to be (Morita) equivalent if there is an equivalence of the category of (left) modules over R, R-Mod, and the category of (left) modules over S, S-Mod. It can be shown that the left module categories R-Mod and S-Mod are equivalent if and only if the right module categories Mod-R and Mod-S are equivalent. Further it can be shown that any functor from R-Mod to S-Mod that yields an equivalence is automatically additive.

Any two isomorphic rings are Morita equivalent.

The ring of n-by-n matrices with elements in R, denoted M_n(R), is Morita-equivalent to R for any n > 0. Notice that this generalizes the classification of simple artinian rings given by Artin–Wedderburn theory. To see the equivalence, notice that if X is a left R-module then Xⁿ is an M_n(R)-module where the module structure is given by matrix multiplication on the left of column vectors from X. This allows the definition of a functor from the category of left R-modules to the category of left M_n(R)-modules. The inverse functor is defined by realizing that for any M_n(R)-module there is a left R-module X such that the M_n(R)-module is obtained from X as described above.

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