On products of idempotent matrices

Abstract

In [1], J. M. Howie considered the semigroup of transformations of sets and proved (Theorem 1) that every transformation of a finite set which is not a permutation can be written as a product of idempotents. In view of the analogy between the theories of transformations of finite sets and linear transformations of finite dimensional vector spaces, Howie's theorem suggests a corresponding result for matrices. The purpose of this note is to prove such a result.