It is the purpose of this note to give some characterizations of flat and projective modules, partly in ideal theoretical terms, partly in terms of the exterior product of a module (“puissance extérieure“); cf. (1).
We shall consider left modules over a ring R with identity element and without proper zero divisors. The left module M is called flat if X ⊗R M is an exact functor on the category of right R-modules X. If M is flat over a commutative domain R, M is necessarily torsion-free. Therefore when looking for flatness of a module M over a commutative domain, one may assume from the start that M is torsion-free.
In the following theorem, we shall not restrict ourselves to commutative rings R, but the modules concerned have to be torsion-free, which, of course, should mean that rm = 0 implies r = 0 or m = 0.