Smith Normal Form | Matt Baker's Math Blog

I’m teaching Graduate Algebra this semester, and I wanted to record here the proof I gave in class of the (existence part of the) structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a PID. It’s a standard argument, based on the existence of the Smith Normal Form for a matrix with entries in a PID, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a concise and accessible reference.

We assume familiarity with basic definitions in the theory of modules over a (commutative) ring. Our goal is to prove the following:

Theorem: Let $R$ be a principal ideal domain and let $M$ be a finitely generated $R$ -module. Then $M$ is isomorphic to a direct sum of cyclic $R$ -modules. More precisely, there are a non-negative integer $r$ (called the rank of $M$ ) and elements $d_1,\ldots,d_n \in M$ (called the invariant factors of $M$ ) such that $d_i \mid d_{i+1}$ for all $i=1,\ldots,n-1$ and $M \cong R^r \oplus R/(d_1) \oplus R/(d_2) \oplus \cdots \oplus R/(d_n)$ .