Skip to main content
Post Made Community Wiki
Source Link
Steven Landsburg
  • 23k
  • 5
  • 95
  • 153

In his answer above, Martin Brandenburg cited the false belief that every short exact sequence of the form

$$0\rightarrow A\rightarrow A\oplus B\rightarrow B\rightarrow 0$$

must split.

I expect that a far more widespread false belief is that such a sequence can fail to split, when A, B and C are finitely generated modules over a commutative noetherian ring.

(Sketch of relevant proof: We need to show that the identity map in $Hom(A,A)$ lifts to $Hom(A\oplus B,A)$. Thus we need to show exactness on the right of the sequence

$$0\rightarrow Hom(B,A)\rightarrow Hom(A\oplus B,A)\rightarrow Hom(A,A)\rightarrow 0$$

For this, it suffices to localize and then complete at an arbitrary prime $P$. But completion at $P$ is a limit of tensorings with $R/P^n$, so to check exactness we can replace the right-hand $A$ in each Hom-group with $A/P^nA$. Now we are reduced to looking at modules of finite length, and the sequence is forced to be exact because the lengths of the left and right terms add up to the length in the middle. This is due, I think, to Miyata.)