Existence of maximal ideals
Every nontrivial unital commutative ring has a maximal ideal (via Zorn's lemma).
Existence of maximal ideals
Existence of maximal ideals (Zorn): Let be a unital ring with , assumed commutative. Then has a maximal ideal .
This result is typically proved using Zorn's lemma (and hence the axiom of choice ) applied to the partially ordered set of proper ideals of ordered by inclusion.