[Math] What are the main structure theorems on finitely generated commutative monoids

ac.commutative-algebrasemigroups-and-monoids

I should read J. C. Rosales and P. A. García-Sánchez's book Finitely Generated Commutative Monoids and L. Redei's book The Theory of Finitely Generated Commutative Semigroups. I haven't. But here's what I've heard so far:

If we drop the property of being cancellative we get an enormous wilderness of finitely generated commutative monoids, so there shouldn't be any simple 'classification theorem'. But there still might be interesting structure theorems which help us understand this wilderness, just as there are for (say) compact topological abelian groups. What are they?

Best Answer

The comments are getting a bit long so I'll put this as a partial answer. The case of von Neumann regular commutative semigroups was handled by Clifford in the 1940s. A semigroup is von Neumann regular if for all $a$, there exists $b$ with $aba=a$. Clifford proved a regular commutative semigroup is the same thing as a pair $(E,F)$ where $E$ is a poset with binary meets and $F$ is a presheaf of abelian groups on $E$. If the semigroup is a finitely generated monoid then $E$ will be a finite lattice.

For example, given such a pair, the underlying set of the semigroup is the disjoint union of the $F(e)$ with $e$ in $E$ (so the arrow set of the associated discrete fibration). The product of $a \in F(e)$ with $b \in F(e')$ is obtained by restricting both elements to the meet of $e$ and $e'$ and taking their product.

The more general semilattice decompositions in the comments are not as good as this.

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