Criteria for Total Projectivity

All groups herein are assumed to be abelian. It was not until the 1940's that it was known that a subgroup of an infinite direct sum of finite cyclic groups is again a direct sum of cyclics. This result rests on a general criterion due to Kulikov [7] for a primary abelian group to be a direct sum of cyclic groups. If G is p-primary, Kulikov's criterion presupposes that G has no elements (other than zero) having infinite p-height. For such a group G, the criterion is simply that G be the union of an ascending sequence of subgroups Hn where the heights of the elements of Hn computed in G are bounded by some positive integer λ(n). The theory of abelian groups has now developed to the point that totally projective groups currently play much the same role, at least in the theory of torsion groups, that direct sums of cyclic groups and countable groups played in combination prior to the discovery of totally projective groups and their structure beginning with a paper by R. Nunke [11] in 1967.