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Friday, July 27, 2012

Injective modules are hard to deal with

This is related to a Mathoverflow question. The proofs of existence of injective  resolutions require the axiom of choice, in one form or another. Translation:  these proofs  are not constructive, so there are no general algorithms for producing such objects.  This becomes a painful issue in concrete  situations.     This  has similarities with another famous existence result, the Hahn-Banach theorem  which postulates the existence of  continuous linear functionals with certain properties. It is particularly useful for existence theorems for PDE's. Unfortunately it gives you no guide for finding those solutions.

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