English

Presentations for P^K

Rings and Algebras 2021-05-14 v1 Group Theory

Abstract

It is a classical result that the direct product AxB of two groups is finitely generated (finitely presented) if and only if A and B are both finitely generated (finitely presented). This is also true for direct products of monoids, but not for semigroups. The typical (counter)example is when A and B are both the additive semigroup P = {1,2,3,...} of positive integers. Here P is freely generated by a single element, but P^2 is not finitely generated, and hence not finitely presented. In this note we give an explicit presentation for P^2 in terms of the unique minimal generating set; in fact, we do this more generally for P^K, the direct product of arbitrarily many copies of P.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.06127,
  title  = {Presentations for P^K},
  author = {James East},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.06127},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

4 pages, no figures. To appear in Monatshefte f\"ur Mathematik

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:04:06.514Z