A Prime Ideal Principle in commutative algebra

In this paper, we offer a general Prime Ideal Principle for proving that certain ideals in a commutative ring are prime. This leads to a direct and uniform treatment of a number of standard results on prime ideals in commutative algebra, due to Krull, Cohen, Kaplansky, Herstein, Isaacs, McAdam, D.D. Anderson, and others. More significantly, the simple nature of this Prime Ideal Principle enables us to generate a large number of hitherto unknown results of the “maximal implies prime” variety. The key notions used in our uniform approach to such prime ideal problems are those of Oka families and Ako families of ideals in a commutative ring, defined in (2.1) and (2.2). Much of this work has also natural interpretations in terms of categories of cyclic modules.