Why are noetherian rings such natural objects in algebraic geometry? The best answer I’ve ever been able to come up with is that the class of noetherian rings contains the classical number rings and and is closed under the formation of polynomial rings, localization, completion, and quotients. So it contains many of the rings you will come across in ordinary situations (whatever that means). It also has the advantage that the definition is tractable enough that if someone hands you an explicit ring, it’s not out of the question to try to work out from scratch whether it’s noetherian. If you’re the kind of person who likes abstract fields, then they’re also included. On the other hand, I don’t think of it as a truly fundamental concept, like say finite presentation. But there is no denying its convenience. If you need to avoid some infinitary phenomena but you still want a broad class of rings, it’s often hard to beat noetherianness. It’s also quite good in situations where you’re too lazy to work out exactly what finiteness conditions you care about.
Why do the Localization of a Ring? Localization is a technique which allows one to concentrate attention to what is happening near a prime, for example. When you localize at a prime, you have simplified abruptly the behavior of your ring outside that prime but you have more or less kept everything inside it intact. For lots of questions, this significantly simplifies things. Indeed, there are very general procedures, in lots of contexts, which go by the name of localization, and their purpose is usually the same: if you are lucky, the problems you are interested in can be solved locally and then the “local solutions” can be glued together to obtain a solution to your original problem. Moreover, an immense deal of effort has been done in order to extent the meaning of “local” so as to be able to apply this strategy in more contexts: I have always loved the way the proofs of some huge theorems of algebraic geometry consist more or less in setting up an elaborate technology in order to be able to say the magical “It is enough to prove this locally”, and then, thanks to the fact that we worked so much in that technology, immediately conclude the proof with a “where it is obvious”. Of course, all sort of bad things can happen. For example, sometimes the “local solutions” cannot be glued together into a “global solution”, &c. (Incidentally, when this happens, so that you can do something locally but not glue the result, you end up with a cohomology theory which, more or less, is the art of dealing with that problem)
Note: Let be an algebraic number field. Then an element is integral iff its monic irreducible polynomial has integer coefficients. For example, for integer is integral. If , then the monic irreducible polynomial of over is , so is integral. Thus the integral closure of in contains the subring , and the subring if . We show that there are no other integral elements. An element with rational and is integral iff its monic irreducible polynomial belongs to . Therefore, are integers. If , for , then it is easy to see that iff for some , and is divisible by 4. The latter implies that d is a quadratic residue modulo 4, i.e. . In turn, if then every element is integral. Thus, integral elements of are equal to if , and if .