Noun
Grothendieck group (plural Grothendieck groups)
English Wikipedia has an article on:Grothendieck groupWikipedia
(mathematics) An abelian group constructed from a commutative monoid in a universal way.
The construction, detailed in the article on the Grothendieck group, is "universal", in that it has the universal property of being unique, and homomorphic to any other embedding of an abelian monoid in an abelian group. Source: Internet
However, if the original monoid has an absorbing element then its Grothendieck group is the trivial group. Source: Internet
The Grothendieck group ignores the order in a composition series and views every finite length module as a formal sum of simple modules. Source: Internet