By Schur's lemma, is a division algebra over .
Suppose is transcendental over , i.e. iff for .
The division algebra generated by is then
where is the field of rational functions for ,
and we have a straightforward isomorphism of division -algebras .
By Lower bound on the dimension of the field of rational functions we have the inequality
Since is a vector space over with scalar multiplication given by the action of , we have
and thus
a contradiction.