REND.SEM.MAT.UNIV.PADOVA, Vol. 117 2007) Cohen-Macaulay Homological Dimensions. HENRIK HOLM *) - PETER JéRGENSEN **) ABSTRACT - We define three new homological dimensions: Cohen-Macaulay in- jective, projective, and flat dimension, and show that they inhabit a theory si- milar to that of classical injective, projective, and flat dimension. In particular, we show that finiteness of the new dimensions characterizes Cohen-Macaulay rings with dualizing modules. 1. Introduction. The classical theory of homological dimensions is very important to commutative algebra. In particular, it is useful that there are a number of finiteness conditions on these dimensions which characterize regular rings. For instance, if the projective dimension of each finitely generated A- module is finite, then A is a regular ring. Several attempts have been made to mimic this success by defining homological dimensions whose finiteness would characterize other rings than the regular ones. These efforts have given us complete intersection dimension [2], Gorenstein dimension [1], and Cohen-Macaulay dimension [8]. The normal practice has not been to mimic the full classical theory, which comprises both injective, projective, and flat dimension for arbitrary modules, but rather to focus on projective dimension for finitely generated modules. Hence complete intersection dimension and Cohen-Macaulay dimension only exist in this restricted sense, and the same used to be the case for Gorenstein dimension. *) Indirizzo dell'A.: Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade, Building 1530, 8000 AÊrhus C, Denmark. E-mail:
[email protected] **) Indirizzo dell'A.: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Merz-Court New- castle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE1 7RU.