There are many equivalent conditions, some of them listed below, often saying that a Gorenstein ring is self-dual in some sense.
Gorenstein rings were introduced by Grothendieck in his 1961 seminar (published in (Hartshorne 1967)).
One elementary characterization is: a Noetherian local ring R of dimension zero (equivalently, with R of finite length as an R-module) is Gorenstein if and only if HomR(k, R) has dimension 1 as a k-vector space, where k is the residue field of R. Equivalently, R has simple socle as an R-module.
[3] Another interpretation of the Gorenstein property as a type of duality, for not necessarily graded rings, is: for a field F, a commutative F-algebra R of finite dimension as an F-vector space (hence of dimension zero as a ring) is Gorenstein if and only if there is an F-linear map e: R → F such that the symmetric bilinear form (x, y) := e(xy) on R (as an F-vector space) is nondegenerate.
[4] For a commutative Noetherian local ring (R, m, k) of Krull dimension n, the following are equivalent:[5] A (not necessarily commutative) ring R is called Gorenstein if R has finite injective dimension both as a left R-module and as a right R-module.