Cancellation Problems and Dimension Theory

In this note, we study the global dimension of coalgebras and discuss the class of coalgebras of global dimension less or equal to 1. The coalgebras in this class, which contains all the cosemisimple coalgebras, are called hereditary coalgebras. If C is a finite dimensional coalgebra, then C is hereditary if and only if C (the convolution algebra of C) is a hereditary algebra. Any direct sum of hereditary coalgebras is hereditary too. This gives us many examples of infinite dimensional hereditary coalgebras. A coalgebra is left hereditary if and only if it is right hereditary. Moreover, there do not exist hereditary Hopf algebras of finite dimension which are not cosemisimple.