An analogue of Serre's conjecture for a ring of distributions (Q2192460)

A commutative unital ring \(R\) is a \textit{Hermite ring} if every finitely generated stably free \(R\)-module is free. This condition is equivalent to the condition that every tall left-invertible matrix with entries from \(R\) can be completed to an invertible square matrix with entries from \(R\). The present paper deals with the (complex) unitization \({\mathcal A}={\mathcal C}\delta_0+{\mathcal D}_{+}^{'}\) of the algebra \({\mathcal D}_{+}^{'}\) of all distributions with their distributional support contained in \((0, \infty)\). In this case, \(\delta_0\) denotes the identity and the algebraic operations on \(\mathcal A\) are addition \(+\), convolution \(*\), and multiplication by complex scalars, all defined pointwise. As the main result of the paper, it is shown that \(({\mathcal A}, +, *)\) is a Hermite ring. As a conjecture, it is suggested that the algebra \({\mathcal E}'({\mathbb R})\) of all compactly supported distributions, with pointwise addition and pointwise convolution, is also a Hermite ring. The last result of the paper provides for the ring \(({\mathcal A}, +, *)\) some ``corona-type conditions'' about left invertibility.