Direct summands of direct sums of modules whose endomorphism rings have two maximal right ideals. (Q538072)

A right \(R\)-module \(M\) is called of type \(n\) if its endomorphism ring has exactly \(n\) maximal right ideals. The Krull-Schmidt uniqueness theorem states that every direct summand of a finite direct sum \(\bigoplus_{i=1}^nM_i\) of modules of type 1 is in fact isomorphic to a direct sum \(\bigoplus_{i\in X}M_i\) for some subset \(X\subseteq\{1,\dots,n\}\). An important question concerning this subject is to decide whether this result is valid for other kinds of direct sums. In this paper the authors provide a complete answer for direct sums of modules of type \(\leq 2\). It is shown that in general the Krull-Schmidt theorem is not valid for direct sums of modules of type 2 (Example 3.1). However, there is a positive answer to the mentioned question (Theorem 5.12) and this result can be applied to many important situations (Section 6).