On the Goldie dimension of rings and modules. (Q855959)

The main purpose of this paper is to find bounds for the Goldie dimension of hereditary modules in terms of the cardinality of the generating sets of their quasi-injective hulls, with an eye towards applying these results to the study of (finitely generated) projective modules over (right) hereditary rings. The paper starts with the following very useful observation: If \(P\) is a hereditary module (i.e., each submodule of \(P\) is projective) of infinite Goldie dimension \(\text{Gdim}(P)\), then \(\text{Gdim}(P)\) equals the least cardinal \(\aleph\) such that every submodule of \(P\) is \(\aleph\)-generated. Next, by using set-theoretic combinatorial methods, the authors show that if \(P\) is a finitely generated hereditary module and \(\aleph\) is an infinite cardinal such that the quasi-injective hull of \(P\) is \(\aleph\)-generated, then \(P\) (or any quotient module of \(P\), for that matter) does not contain a direct sum of \(\aleph\) non-zero submodules. An immediate consequence is that every finitely generated hereditary module with countably generated quasi-injective hull is Noetherian. In particular, this shows that if \(R\) is a right hereditary ring with finitely generated injective hull, then \(R\) is right Artinian, giving a positive answer to a question posed by \textit{N. V. Dung}, \textit{R. Wisbauer} and the reviewer [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 118, No. 4, 1029-1034 (1993; Zbl 0787.16003)]. In the last part of the paper, some variants of the previous arguments are applied to non-projective modules over hereditary rings and also to modules whose quotient modules are all injective.