- Research Article
15
- 10.2307/1997458
Homological Algebra and Set Theory
- Mar 01, 1977
- Transactions of the American Mathematical Society
- Paul C Eklof
Assuming the Axiom of Constructibility, necessary and sufficient conditions are given for the vanishing of Ext\ for rings A of global dimension 1.Using Martin's Axiom, the necessity of these conditions is shown not to be a theorem of ZFC.Applications are given to abelian group theory, including a partial solution (assuming V = L) to a problem of Baer on the splitting of abelian groups.Some independence results in abelian group theory are also proved.Introduction.In a remarkable recent paper [22], S. Shelah proved that Whitehead's problem is unsolvable in ordinary set theory (Zermelo-Frankel set theory with the Axiom of Choice).More precisely, he proved that two different answers to the problem are obtained when set theory is extended by adding two different axioms: the Axiom of Constructibility and Martin's Axiom.(See Theorem 4.1.)Shelah's arguments were specific to Whitehead's problem and nonhomological in character.In this paper we extend Shelah's techniques in order to obtain some general results about the vanishing of ExtA (for modules over a ring A of global dimension 1) in different models of set theory, and we apply them to some specific problems in abelian group theory.Assuming the Axiom of Constructibility we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the vanishing of ExtA (Theorems 1.2 and 1.5).To state the result in.a special case: if C and A are abelian groups of cardinality N,, Ext(C, A) -0 if and only if C is the union of an increasing chain of countable subgroups [Cv\v < «,} such that the chain is smooth (i.e., C0 -U"<oC, for aii iimit ordinals a) and satisfies Ext(C0, A) = 0 and E\i(Cv+x/Cv,A) = 0 for all v < K,.Although the sufficiency of this condition is an easy consequence of classical homological algebra (see Theorem 1.2), the proof of necessity makes use of the Axiom of Constructibility (Theorem 1.5).The necessity of this condition is not provable in ordinary set theory; in particular the condition is not necessary when Martin's Axiom is assumed ( §3).
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