Relation With The Group of Units
It was remarked above that the ideal class group provides part of the answer to the question of how much ideals in a Dedekind domain behave like elements. The other part of the answer is provided by the multiplicative group of units of the Dedekind domain, since passage from principal ideals to their generators requires the use of units (and this is the rest of the reason for introducing the concept of fractional ideal, as well):
Define a map from K× to the set of all nonzero fractional ideals of R by sending every element to the principal (fractional) ideal it generates. This is a group homomorphism; its kernel is the group of units of R, and its cokernel is the ideal class group of R. The failure of these groups to be trivial is a measure of the failure of the map to be an isomorphism: that is the failure of ideals to act like ring elements, that is to say, like numbers.
Read more about this topic: Ideal Class Group
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