Unimodular vectors and systems generators. (Vecteurs unimodulaires et systèmes générateurs) (Q2491829)

The author succeeds to give a unified proof to four classical theorems in commutative algebra: Bass's stable range and cancellation theorems, Serre's splitting off theorem, and Forster-Swan's theorem. Besides being comparatively simple, the proof has the merit of justifying more general statements than the original ones, with no noetherian hypothesis. The approach is based on the use of alternating multilinear forms, which allows for explicit computations. The key observation is that the existence of a free direct summand of rank \(t\) to a module \(M\) is equivalent to the existence of an alternate \(t\)-multilinear form on \(M\). The essential technique ingredient in the proof is the notion of \(H\)-dimension recently introduced by \textit{T. Coquand, H. Lombardi} and \textit{C. Quitté} [Manuscr. Math. 115, 513--520 (2004; Zbl 1059.13006)].