A question of Avramov and Foxby concerning injective dimension of complexes is settled in the affirmative for the class of noetherian rings. A key step in the proof is to recast the problem on hand into one about the homotopy category of complexes of injective modules. Analogous results for flat dimension and projective dimension are also established.

A ring R is defined to be semiabelian if every idempotent of R is either right semicentral or left semicentral. It is proved that the set N(R) of nilpotent elements in a π-regular ring R is an ideal of R if and only if R/J(R) is abelian, where J(R) is the Jacobson radical of R. It follows that a semiabelian ring R is π-regular if and only if N(R) is an ideal of R and R/N(R) is regular, which ex...