Local finiteness for Green’s relations in semigroup varieties ∗ MIKHAIL V. VOLKOV Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Ural Federal University, Lenina 51, 62000 Ekaterinburg, Russia
[email protected] † PEDRO V. SILVA Centro de Matem´atica, Faculdade de Ciˆencias, Universidade do Porto, Rua Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
[email protected] ‡ FILIPA SOARES Area´ Departamental de Matem´atica, ISEL — Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, Instituto Polit´ecnico de Lisboa, Rua Conselheiro Em´ıdio Navarro 1, 1959-007 Lisboa, Portugal & CEMAT–CIENCIAS,ˆ Dep. Matem´atica, Faculdade de Ciˆencias, Universidade de Lisboa Campo Grande, Edif´ıcio C6, Piso 2, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal
[email protected] 1. BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW A semigroup S is called locally finite (respectively, periodic) if each finitely gen- erated (respectively, each monogenic) subsemigroup in S is finite. A semigroup variety is locally finite (respectively, periodic) if so are all its members. Clearly, ev- ery locally finite variety is periodic but the converse is not true. The issues related to determining extra properties that distinguish locally finite semigroup varieties amongst periodic ones form a vast research area known as Burnside type prob- lems. The reader can find a brief introduction into the main achievements in this area in [34, Chapter 3]; for the present discussion, it suffices to reproduce here just one powerful result by Sapir (a part of [33, Theorem P]). Recall two notions involved in the formulation of Sapir’s result. A variety is said to be of finite axiomatic rank if for some fixed n > 0, it can be given by a set of identities involving at most n letters.