Abstract

It is well-known that an element of a commutative ring with identity is nilpotent if, and only if, it lies in every prime ideal of the ring. A modification of this fact is amenable to a very simple proof mining analysis. We formulate a quantitative version of this modification and obtain an explicit bound. We present an application. This proof mining analysis is theleitmotiffor some comments and observations on the methodology of computational extraction. In particular, we emphasize that the formulation of quantitative versions of ordinary mathematical theorems is ofindependent interestfrom proof mining metatheorems.