The main purpose of this paper is to study maximal non-Noetherian subrings R of a domain S. We give characterizations of such domains in several cases. If the ring R is semi-local, R S is a residually algebraic pair and R is a maximal nonNoetherian subring of S, we give sharp upper bounds for the number of rings and the length of chains of rings in R S , the set of intermediary rings. Key Words: Jaffard domain; Krull dimension; valuation domain; Noetherian domain; finite-type module; pullbacks.
INTRODUCTIONAll rings considered in this paper are supposed to be integral domains. The quotient field of a ring R is denoted by qf R , the Krull dimension dim R, and the integral closure R . For a ring extension R ⊂ S, we denote by R S the set of all rings T such that R ⊆ T ⊆ S, by tr deg S R the transcendence degree of qf S over qf R , and by R * the integral closure of R in S. If the set R S is finite, we will denote by R S its cardinality. If P and Q are two primes of R such that P ⊆ Q, then P Q denotes the set of all primes Q of R such that P ⊆ Q ⊆ Q. Let R be a domain; we denote by R n the ring of polynomials in n indeterminates with coefficient in R, (for n = 1, R 1 = R X is the ring of polynomials in one indeterminate). We recall that a ring R of finite (Krull) dimension n is a Jaffard ring if its valuative dimension (the limit of the sequence dim R X 1 X n − n, All rights reserved.