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were UFDs, yet as Kummer pointed out, was not a UFD. In 1846 and 1847 Kummer introduced ideal numbers and proved unique factorization into ideal primes for cyclotomic fields. Dedekind extended this in 1871 to show that every nonzero ideal in the domain of integers of an algebraic number field is a unique product of prime ideals, a precursor of the theory of Dedekind domains. Overall, Dedekind's work created the subject of algebraic number theory.

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