High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics, an associative algebra A is a (not necessarily unital) associative ring that has a compatible structure of a vector space over a certain field K or, more generally, of a module over a commutative ring R. Thus A is endowed with binary operations of addition and multiplication satisfying a number of axioms, including associativity of multiplication and distributivity, as well as compatible multiplication by the elements of the field K or the ring R.