The word problem for one-relation monoids: a survey

This survey is intended to provide an overview of one of the oldest and most celebrated open problems in combinatorial algebra: the word problem for one-relation monoids. We provide a history of the problem starting in 1914, and give a detailed overview of the proofs of central results, especially those due to Adian and his student Oganesian. After showing how to reduce the problem to the left cancellative case, the second half of the survey focuses on various methods for solving partial cases in this family. We finish with some modern and very recent results pertaining to this problem, including a link to the Collatz conjecture. Along the way, we emphasise and address a number of incorrect and inaccurate statements that have appeared in the literature over the years. We also fill a gap in the proof of a theorem linking special inverse monoids to one-relation monoids, and slightly strengthen the statement of this theorem.

Inverse monoids and immersions of Δ-complexes

An immersion [Formula: see text] between [Formula: see text]-complexes is a [Formula: see text]-map that induces injections from star sets of [Formula: see text] to star sets of [Formula: see text]. We study immersions between finite-dimensional connected [Formula: see text]-complexes by replacing the fundamental group of the base space by an appropriate inverse monoid. We show how conjugacy classes of the closed inverse submonoids of this inverse monoid may be used to classify connected immersions into the complex. This extends earlier results of Margolis and Meakin for immersions between graphs and of Meakin and Szakács on immersions into 2-dimensional [Formula: see text]-complexes.

Structure of principal one-sided ideals

We give a thorough structural analysis of the principal one-sided ideals of arbitrary semigroups, and then apply this to full transformation semigroups and symmetric inverse monoids. One-sided ideals of these semigroups naturally occur as semigroups of transformations with restricted range or kernel.