Indecomposable Decompositions of Torsion-free Abelian Groups

Abstract

An indecomposable decomposition of a torsion-free abelian group $G$ of rank $n$ is a decomposition $G=A_1\oplus \cdots \oplus A_t$ where $A_i$ is indecomposable of rank $r_i$ so that ${\sum }_i{r}_i=n$ is a partition of $n$. The group $G$ may have decompositions that result in different partitions of $n$. We address the problem of characterising those sets of partitions of $n$ which can arise from indecomposable decompositions of a torsion-free abelian group.