On uniqueness of direct decompositions of groups into directly indecomposable factors (Q910496)

This is the latest in a long series of papers by the author dealing with direct products of groups, especially with their Hopf property and with direct decompositions into directly indecomposable factors. Two of the earlier papers are in Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 249, 331-340 (1979; Zbl 0377.20032), and J. Algebra 115, 352-365 (1988; Zbl 0647.20024), in which some of the preliminary results of the present paper are proved. The author calls a group an RKS (Remak-Krull-Schmidt) group if it can be directly decomposed into directly indecomposable factors in essentially one way only. He then proves a necessary and sufficient condition for a group to be an RKS group, under the assumption that it is finitely generated modulo its derived group and satisfies the minimal condition for direct factors modulo its centre. The criterion states that there is a non-negative integer s depending on the group such that the direct product of the group and a free abelian group of rank s has the property that every direct factor of it which is a direct product of a directly indecomposable group and a free abelian group is itself an RKS group.