Rings with countably many direct summands (Q4944388)

As motivation for this work the authors cite several results which show that certain types of ring have special properties when they are countable. For instance Lawrence showed that a countable self-injective ring is QF. The types of ring considered, such as Baer rings, have an abundant supply of idempotents, and so the authors consider the structural consequences for such rings in the more general situation where cardinality conditions are imposed on the set of idempotents of a ring \(R\) up to some equivalence relation. An example of such a condition is that \(R\) has only a countable number of right ideals of the form \(eR\) with \(e\) idempotent, and a typical consequence is that \(R\) has no infinite sets of non-zero orthogonal idempotents.