Associated Prime Divisors in the Sense of Krull

In a recent paper by Douglas Underwood [8] several definitions of “associated prime divisors” were discussed and shown to be unique. In this note we produce a fifth type, which is due to W. Krull, and is found in his classical paper [2] and further discussed by B. Banaschewski in[1].Historically this characterization considerably predates the other four definitions.Throughout this note,Rdenotes a commutative ring with unity, and all ideals and elements are assumed to be in such a ring. We shall let upper case letters, most frequently the beginning of the alphabet, denote ideals and lower case letters, elements ofR.On the whole, our terminology will be that of [9]. We do, however, take exception with [9] in two instances, viz.