The Krull-Schmidt Theorem in the Case Two

Abstract

We study what happens if, in the Krull-Schmidt Theorem, instead of considering modules whose endomorphism rings have one maximal ideal, we consider modules whose endomorphism rings have two maximal ideals. If a ring has exactly two maximal right ideals, then the two maximal right ideals are necessarily two-sided. We call such a ring of type 2. The behavior of direct sums of finitely many modules whose endomorphism rings have type 2 is completely described by a graph whose connected components are either complete graphs or complete bipartite graphs. The vertices of the graphs are ideals in a suitable full subcategory of Mod-R. The edges are isomorphism classes of modules. The complete bipartite graphs give rise to a behavior described by a Weak Krull-Schmidt Theorem. Such a behavior had been previously studied for the classes of uniserial modules, biuniform modules, cyclically presented modules over a local ring, kernels of morphisms between indecomposable injective modules, and couniformly presented modules. All these modules have endomorphism rings that are either local or of type 2. Here we present a general theory that includes all these cases.