Note that in other places they may call this an integral domain
For the rightward implication we can use properties of a ring to see the following
Therefore we conclude that either or , the latter of which is impossible through our assumption that , therefore .
We move on to the leftward implication where our goal is to show that is a domain, we do so by chasing it's corollary. So let and assume that , note that at this point if , our proof is over, therefore we assume that , note that we can rewrite to , then by our assumption we can conclude that , which proves it.
Since forms a ring then we can then notice the following: Where we're noticing that the degree of the product has decreased, this is occuring because in there are non-zero elements which have a product of .
If then our proof is done, so instead let's assume that , we know that it's nilpotent, considering it has a least element (as it's non-empty) say such that , note that because
In that case we can see , since was the smallest natural number such that then we must have since . Thus we can conclude that where so that by definition is a zero divisor.
If , it clearly holds so lets assume that for some .
We claim that is 's multiplicative inverse.
To see this true, we use distributivity, Define the following and that
Note that because 's last term is since .
Through finite induction, we can show that for any which allows us to conclude that and then from the previous paragraph.
Finally this is good because now we continue the chain of equalities we mentioned at distributivity Therefore is a unit, as needed.
Since is a unit there exists some such that , if that's the case then , we know that is nilpotent and thus is a unit, so we have some such that .
But so in total we're saying by associativity we have and closure of multiplication shows us indeed has a multiplicative inverse so that is a unit.