An associative unital algebra over a commutative unital ring is a monoid internal to the category of modules over that ring with respect to the usual tensor product of such modules.
Let be a commutative unital ring. All
-modules considered are supposed to be unital. Let
be a tensor product functor for
-modules and let
be the corresponding associator
and
and
the left and right unitors.
An associative unital algebra over is any triple
such that
and such that the following conditions are met: