9623579 Letzter This award supports the research of Professor E. Letzter to work in non-commutative ring theory with special emphasis on problems arising from the theory of quantum groups. In particular, Professor Letzter will study prime and primitive ideals in finitely generated noncomutative Noetherian bialgebras, Hopf superalgebras, and iterated skew polynomial rings. He hopes to apply this work to studying multiparametric quantum function algebras in the root-of-unity case. This is research in the subfield of algebra called non-commutative ring theory. Algebra can be thought of as the study of symmetry in the abstract. As such, algebra has direct applications to areas of physics and chemistry. In fact, much of non-commutative ring theory generalizes structures found in quantum mechanics and this proposal continues to explore areas that connect directly with modern quantum field theory.
