We will consider unital rings A with free additive group, and want to construct (in ZFC) for each natural number k a family of ${\aleph }_k$-free A-modules G which are separable as abelian groups with special decompositions. Recall that an A-module G is ${\aleph }_k$-free if every subset of size $<{\aleph }_k$ is contained in a free submodule (we will refine this in Definition 3.2); and it is separable as an abelian group if any finite subset of G is contained in a free direct summand of G. Despite the fact that such a module G is...

This paper is concerned with the isomorphic structure of the Banach space ${\ell }_{\infty }/c₀$ and how it depends on combinatorial tools whose existence is consistent with but not provable from the usual axioms of ZFC. Our main global result is that it is consistent that ${\ell }_{\infty }/c₀$ does not have an orthogonal ${\ell }_{\infty }$-decomposition, that is, it is not of the form ${\ell }_{\infty }\left(X\right)$ for any Banach space X. The main local result is that it is consistent that ${\ell }_{\infty }\left(c₀\left(\right)\right)$ does not embed isomorphically into ${\ell }_{\infty }/c₀$, where is the cardinality of the continuum, while ${\ell }_{\infty }$...