This paper owes its origins to Pere Menal and his work on Von Neumann Regular (= VNR) rings, especially his work listed in the bibliography on when the tensor product K = A ⊗K B of two algebras over a field k are right self-injective (= SI) or VNR. Pere showed that then A and B both enjoy the same property, SI or VNR, and furthermore that either A and B are algebraic algebras over k (see [M]). This is connected with a lemma in the proof of the Hilbert Nullstellensatz, namely a finite ring extension K = k[a1, ..., an] is a field only if a1, ..., an are algebraic over k.
@article{urn:eudml:doc:41734, title = {Self-injective Von Neumann regular subrings and a theorem of Pere Menal.}, journal = {Publicacions Matem\`atiques}, volume = {36}, year = {1992}, pages = {541-567}, mrnumber = {MR1209823}, zbl = {0782.16003}, language = {en}, url = {http://dml.mathdoc.fr/item/urn:eudml:doc:41734} }
Faith, Carl. Self-injective Von Neumann regular subrings and a theorem of Pere Menal.. Publicacions Matemàtiques, Tome 36 (1992) pp. 541-567. http://gdmltest.u-ga.fr/item/urn:eudml:doc:41734/