Grothendieck rings of theories of modules (Q487696)

The model-theoretic Grothendieck ring of a structure is built from its definable subsets, up to definable bijection, with disjoint union as the sum operation and Cartesian product for the multiplication. In a number of contexts, this has been shown to collapse to the trivial ring. The reviewer had conjectured that the Grothendieck ring of a non-zero module is non-trivial but, beyond the case of modules over semisimple Artinian rings, due to \textit{S. Perera} [Grothendieck rings of theories of modules. (PhD Thesis) (2011)], this was still entirely open. In this paper, the author gives a complete solution, establishing non-triviality and giving a description of the Grothendieck ring, as a polynomial ring modulo some relations, even in the case where the module does not satisfy the \(T=T^{\aleph_0}\) condition. The proof is hard and mixes combinatorial and lattice-theoretic ideas with techniques from simplicial homology.