The Baer–Specker group is the group B = ZN of all integer sequences with componentwise addition, that is, the direct product of countably infinitely many copies of Z. It can equivalently be described as the additive group of formal power series with integer coefficients.
Properties
Reinhold Baer proved in 1937 that this group is notfree abelian; Specker proved in 1950 that every countable subgroup of B is free abelian.
The group of homomorphisms from the Baer–Specker group to a free abelian group of finite rank is a free abelian group of countable rank. This provides another proof that the group is not free.[1]
^Blass & Göbel (1996) attribute this result to Specker (1950). They write it in the form where denotes the Baer-Specker group, the star operator gives the dual group of homomorphisms to , and is the free abelian group of countable rank. They continue, "It follows that has no direct summand isomorphic to ", from which an immediate consequence is that is not free abelian.
Griffith, Phillip A. (1970), Infinite Abelian group theory, Chicago Lectures in Mathematics, University of Chicago Press, pp. 1, 111–112, ISBN0-226-30870-7.
Cornelius, E. F., Jr. (2009), "Endomorphisms and product bases of the Baer-Specker group", Int'l J Math and Math Sciences, 2009, article 396475, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijmms/