MODULES WHOSE ENDOMORPHISM RINGS ARE DIVISION RINGS

The well-known Schur's Lemma states that the endomorphism ring of a simple module is a division ring. But the converse is not true in general. In this paper we study modules whose endomorphism rings are division rings. We first reduce our consideration to the case of faithful modules with this property. Using the existence of such modules, we obtain results on a new notion which generalizes that of primitive rings. When R is a full or triangular matrix ring over a commutative ring, a structure theorem is proved for an R-module M such that End(R)(M) is a division ring. A number of examples are given to illustrate our results and to motivate further study on this topic.