ABSTRACT
This paper was inspired by a clever observation in [HL]. A companion paper is [MS], which studies unique comaximal factorization of elements in a domain. (The closing remark of this paper points out a slight difference in terminology between this paper and that one.)
Given a polynomial f ( X ) € ^[^], we must study when f ( X ) has a monic associate. That is, we must explore when there are polynomials u(X) and k(X] in R[X] with u(X) a unit, k(X) monic, and f ( X ) = u ( X ) k ( X ) . Lemma 1. // f ( X ) 6 -R[-X] has a monic associate, then it has a unique monic associate.
