Decomposition of totally transcendental modules

Abstract

The main theorem of this paper states that if R is a ring and is a totally transcendental R-module, then has a unique decomposition as a direct sum of indecomposable R-modules. Natural examples of totally transcendental modules are injective modules over noetherian rings, artinian modules over commutative rings, projective modules over left-perfect, right-coherent rings, and arbitrary modules over Σ – α-gens rings. Therefore, our decomposition theorem yields as special cases the purely algebraic unique decomposition theorems for these four classes of modules due to Matlis; Warfield; Mueller, Eklof, and Sabbagh; and Shelah and Fisher. These results and a number of other corollaries about totally transcendental modules are covered in §1. In §2, I show how the results of § 1 can be used to give an improvement of Baur's classification of ω-categorical modules over countable rings. In §3, the decomposition theorem is used to study modules with quantifier elimination over noetherian rings.The goals of this section are to prove the decomposition theorem and to derive some of its immediate corollaries. I will begin with some notational conventions. R will denote a ring with an identity element. L_R is the language of left R-modules described in [4, p. 251] and T_R is the theory of left R-modules. “R-module” will mean “unital left R-module”. A formula will mean an L_R-formula.