Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
An outstanding unsolved problem in the theory of rings is the existence or non-existence of a simple nil ring. Such a ring cannot be locally nilpotent as is well known [ 5 ]. Hence, if a simple nil ring were to exist, it would follow that there exists a finitely generated nil ring which is not nilpotent. This seemed an unlikely situation until the appearance of Golod's paper [ 1 ] where a finitely generated, non-nilpotent ring is constructed for any d ≥ 2 generators over any field.