Functional Identities

The theory of functional identities (FIs) is a relatively new one - the first results were published at the beginning of the 1990s, and this is the first book on this subject. An FI can be informally described as an identical relation involving arbitrary elements in an associative ring together with arbitrary (unknown) functions. The goal of the general FI theory is to describe these functions, or, when this is not possible, to describe the structure of the ring admitting the FI in question. This abstract theory has turned out to be a powerful tool for solving a variety of problems in ring th