No label defined (Q4956004)

This is an important book which is destined to become the standard reference work in the field. Torsion-free finite rank (tffr) Abelian groups are the additive subgroups of finite dimensional vector spaces. Shelah has shown that they can have no tractable structure theory, so interest has always been concentrated on subclasses which may. The first success in this direction came in the 1930s when Baer classified the completely decomposable groups, that is, direct sums of subgroups of the rationals. The next landmark came in the 1950s when Jónsson, noting the failure of isomorphically unique decomposition of tffr groups into indecomposables, postulated a weaker equivalence than isomorphism, called quasi-isomorphism, and showed that decomposition into quasi-indecomposables is essentially unique. Using this concept, Butler in the 1960s studied tffr groups having a completely decomposable homomorphic image and discovered useful structure and representation theorems for this class of groups, which now bares his name. This left unanswered the question of the structure of tffr groups which are quasi-isomorphic to the completely decomposable groups, known as almost completely decomposable (acd) tffr groups. They form the main subject of the book under review. Over 100 papers have been published in this area since the pioneering work of Lady in the 1970s, who pointed out that the appropriate equivalence for the class of acd groups is near-isomorphism, which is coarser than isomorphism but finer than quasi-isomorphism. Much of the research in this area over the past 20 years is due to the author and his colleagues. In the early Chapters, Mader introduces the main tools required for the study of acd groups, namely the poset of types and integral linear algebra. He reviews and simplifies the known results on completely decomposable and Butler groups and then introduces acd groups represented as finite extensions of completely decomposable groups. He then describes canonical completely decomposable subgroups, called regulating subgroups and the regulator, and the corresponding finite quotients. If these finite Abelian groups are \(p\)-groups, the structure of the acd group simplifies as there is unique decomposition up to near-isomorphism. Otherwise, the inverse images of the primary constituents of these quotients are used to establish local-global relationships. By now, we are about one third of the way through the book and the rest is a detailed analysis at the level of a research monograph of topics such as completely decomposable summands, representations of type posets, lifting idempotents from the finite quotients and the classification of special types of acd groups whose structures are amenable. Finally, the author presents a critical review of the literature and an extensive Bibliography. The book is presented as a graduate level textbook in the sense that all definitions are presented in full with explanations and examples, proofs are complete and the chapters end with exercises which tend to cover details from the literature which are not fully covered in the text. A noteworthy feature is that solutions to most of the exercises also appear.