ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Reduced ring

Ok, Imagine you have a fancy ring with lots of decorations on it. Now, let's say you want to make a new ring that's a bit simpler and less fancy.

So, you take your fancy ring and remove some of the decorations, like taking off a few stones or making the patterns a bit simpler. What you're left with is your new ring, which is still pretty but not as complicated as the old one.

That's kind of like what happens with a reduced ring in math. It's a simpler version of a ring that has had some of its fancy features taken away so that it's easier to work with.

In math, a ring is a structure that has two operations--addition and multiplication--that work together in certain ways. But sometimes these operations can be tricky to deal with when the ring has a lot of complicated features.

So, if we want to make things easier, we can create a new ring that's a simplified version of the first one by removing some parts. This new ring is called a reduced ring.

Just like with a simpler ring, a reduced ring still has the addition and multiplication operations, but it's missing some of the extra features that the original ring had. This makes it easier to work with and helps us understand certain things about the original ring better.

So you see, even in math, sometimes it's better to keep things simple.
Related topics others have asked about: