Representations of algebras as universal localizations

Abstract

Given a presentation of a finitely presented group, there is a natural way to represent the group as the fundamental group of a 2-complex. The first part of this paper demonstrates one possible way to represent a finitely presented algebra $S$ in a similarly compact form. From a presentation of the algebra, we construct a quiver with relations whose path algebra is finite dimensional. When we adjoin inverses to some of the arrows in the quiver, we show that the path algebra of the new quiver with relations is $M_n(S)$ where $n$ is the number of vertices in our quiver. The slogan would be that every finitely presented algebra is Morita equivalent to a universal localization of a finite dimensional algebra.