Serial Right Noetherian Rings
A module M is called a serial module if the family of its submodules is linearly ordered under inclusion. A ring R is said to be serial if RR as well as RR are finite direct sums of serial modules. Nakayama [8] started the study of artinian serial rings, and he called them generalized uniserial rings. Murase [5, 6, 7] proved a number of structure theorems on generalized uniserial rings, and he described most of them in terms of quasi-matrix rings over division rings. Warfield [12] studied serial both sided noetherian rings, and showed that any such indecomposable ring is either artinian or prime. He further showed that a both sided noetherian prime serial ring is an (R:J)-block upper triangular matrix ring, where R is a discrete valuation ring with Jacobson radical J. In this paper we determine the structure of serial right noetherian rings (Theorem 2.11).