Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2013/iii/paper-5/1/a/solution

Assume first that , as required for the irreducible-module conclusion. If is surjective, any nonzero invariant subspace contains every image of one of its nonzero vectors under all endomorphisms, hence is all of . Thus is irreducible.
Conversely an irreducible -module is finite dimensional: for , is a quotient of the finite-dimensional vector space . Let be the image of in . It acts faithfully and irreducibly. The subspace is a submodule, so is zero or all of . The latter alternative would imply for every , contradicting nilpotence of the Jacobson radical. Therefore , and faithfulness gives .
The Artin–Wedderburn theorem makes a product of matrix algebras. A faithful simple module forces there to be just one factor, because all other factors would annihilate that module. Thus and , so the action is the full endomorphism algebra. This is the Burnside matrix-algebra theorem.
For nonzero , surjectivity is equivalent to irreducibility. The zero module is a literal exception if it is admitted: its endomorphism algebra is zero, so the action map is surjective, whereas the zero module is not irreducible.

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