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EntityQ18848· pop 44· linked from 636 articles

Also known as module over a ring

generalization of vector space, with scalars in a ring instead of a field

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WikiProject Mathematics
different from
absolute value
on focus list of Wikimedia project
Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
underlying structure
abelian group
studied by
module theory
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Encyclopedic overview

In mathematics, a module is a generalization of the notion of vector space in which the field of scalars is replaced by a (not necessarily commutative) ring. The concept of a module also generalizes the notion of an abelian group, since the abelian groups are exactly the modules over the ring of integers.

Like a vector space, a module is an additive abelian group, and scalar multiplication is distributive over the operations of addition between elements of the ring or module and is compatible with the ring multiplication.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “module” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.