A ring A has finite norm properly, abbreviated FNP, if each proper homomorphic image of A is finite. In [3], Chew and Lawn described some of the structural properties of FNP rings with identity, which they called residually finite rings. The twofold aim of this paper is to extend the results of [3] to arbitrary rings with FNP and to give characterizations of FNP rings independent of the results of [3].
If A is a ring, let A+ denote A regarded as an abelian group. In the first section of this paper, we explore the effects of FNP upon the structure of A+. The following theorem is typical of the results in this section.