Uniqueness of monogeny classes for uniform objects in abelian categories (Q1612144)

The main result of the paper under review is a uniqueness theorem for the monogeny class of a finite coproduct \(A=A_1\oplus \cdots \oplus A_n\) of uniform objects of an abelian category \({\mathcal C}\). More precisely, given another finite coproduct \(B=B_1\oplus\cdots\oplus B_m\) of uniform objects in \({\mathcal C}\) admitting monomorphisms \(A\to B\) and \(B\to A\), it is shown that \(n=m\) and there are monomorphisms \(A_i\to B_{\sigma(i)}\) and \(B_{\sigma(i)}\to A_i\) for each \(i\) and some permutation \(\sigma\). The authors give an elementary proof on slightly more than two pages. Alternatively, one might view the result as a consequence of the classical Krull-Remak-Schmidt theorem. To see this, observe that one can assume \({\mathcal C}\) to be a small category. Embed \({\mathcal C}\) into the abelian Grothendieck category of left exact functors \({\mathcal C}^{op}\to {\mathcal A}b\) where \({\mathcal A}b\) denotes the category of abelian groups. The embedding is exact and sends uniform objects to uniform objects. Passing to the injective envelopes of \(A\) and \(B\), the classical Krull-Remak-Schmidt theorem can be applied.