Indecomposable Decomposition and Couniserial Dimension A. Ghorbania, S. K. Jainb,c ∗and Z. Nazemiana † a Department of Mathematical Sciences, Isfahan University of Technology P.O.Box: 84156-83111, Isfahan, Iran b Department of Mathematics, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA c King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, SA a−
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Dimensions like Gelfand, Krull, Goldie have an intrinsic role in the study of theory of rings and modules. They provide useful technical tools for studying their structure. In this paper we define one of the dimensions called couniserial dimension that measures how close a ring or module is to being uniform. Despite their different objectives, it turns out that arXiv:1408.0056v1 [math.RA] 1 Aug 2014 there are certain common properties between the couniserial dimension and Krull dimension like each module having such a dimension contains a uniform submodule and has finite uniform dimension, among others. Like all dimensions, this is an ordinal valued invariant. Every mod- ule of finite length has couniserial dimension and its value lies between the uniform dimension and the length of the module. Modules with countable couniserial dimension are shown to possess indecomposable Key Words: Uniform module; Maximal right quotient ring; Indecomposable decompo- sition; Uniserial dimension; Couniserial dimension; Von Neumann regular ring; Semisimple module. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 16D70, 16D90, 16P70, Secondary 03E10, 13E10. ∗Corresponding author; †This paper was presented at the OSU-Denison conference, May 10, 2014 and at the University of California, San Diego, June 21, 2014. 1 decomposition.