The exchange property appears in rudimentary form as the Steinitz Exchange Lemma for vector spaces (see, for example, [73, Lemma 4.3.4]) and, as a slightly more general forerunner, in the following well-known property of semisimple modules (see [363, 20.1]).
Steinitz' Exchange Lemma for semisimple modules. LetIn module theory, the exchange property plays a prominent rôle in the study of isomorphic refinements of direct sum decompositions of modules. We first record two elementary lemmas on submodules of direct sums which will be frequently useful.
LemmaProof. Since M 1 ⊆ N , the modularity property gives11.3. Lemma. Let M = M 1 ⊕ M 2 , let π 1 : M → M 1 be the projection map, and let N be a submodule of M . Then M = N ⊕ M 2 if and only if the restriction π 1 | N : N → M 1 is an isomorphism. In this case, the projection map π N : M → N associated with the direct sum M = N ⊕ M 2 is given by π 1 (π 1 | N ) −1 . 11.7. Corollary. Let c be a cardinal number and I be an index set of cardinality at most c. Let A, M, N, L, and A i , i ∈ I, be modules such thatIf M has the c-exchange property, then there exist submodules B i ⊆ A i such thatProof. This follows from the Lemma after factoring out L and applying the cexchange property.
Direct sums and thec-exchange property. Let c be a cardinal number and let M = X ⊕ Y . Then M has the c-exchange property if and only if both X and Y have the c-exchange property. Proof. Assume that both X and Y have the c-exchange property and let A = M ⊕ N = I A i , where card(I) ≤ c. Then, by our assumption on Y ,This implies that A = X ⊕ ( I B i ). Hence X has the c-exchange property.As a corollary we obtain: 11.9. Finite direct sums and the exchange properties. Let M = M 1 ⊕ · · · ⊕ M k . Then M has the (finite) exchange property if and only if M i has the (finite) exchange property for each i = 1, . . . , k.Example 12.15 will show that 11.9 does not generalise to infinite direct sums.
Proposition. LetIf T has the finite exchange property and N ⊆ L, then K has the finite exchange property.a direct summand of T . Hence K has the finite exchange property. Chapter 3. Decompositions of modules 11.12. Summable homomorphisms. Let M and N be R-modules. We say that a family {f i : M → N } I of homomorphisms is summable if, given any m ∈ M , then (m)f i = 0 for all but a finite number of indices i ∈ I. In this case we can define the sum I f i of the family, in the obvious way. Clearly, if {f i : M → N } I is summable, so too is {f i g i : M → K} i∈I for any R-module K and any family of homomorphisms {g i : N → K} I . The following result shows that for an R-module M it suffices to check the exchange property in the case when M is isomorphic to a direct sum of clones of itself. Moreover, it also characterises the exchange property using summable families in M 's endomorphism ring. 11.13. The exchange property and summable families. Let M be an R-module, S = End(M ), and c be any cardinal. Then the following statements are equivalent. (a) M has the c-exchange property; (b) for any index set I with car...