In abelian group theory, an abelian group is said to be cotorsion if every extension of it by a torsion-free group splits. If the group is , this says that for all torsion-free groups . It suffices to check the condition for the group of rational numbers.

More generally, a module M over a ring R is said to be a cotorsion module if Ext1(F,M)=0 for all flat modules F. This is equivalent to the definition for abelian groups (considered as modules over the ring Z of integers) because over Z flat modules are the same as torsion-free modules.

Some properties of cotorsion groups:

References

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  • Fuchs, L. (2001) [1994], "Cotorsion group", Encyclopedia of Mathematics, EMS Press