The Lattice of Equational Classes of Commutative Semigroups

Abstract

There has been some interest lately in equational classes of commutative semigroups (see, for example, [2; 4; 7; 8]). The atoms of the lattice of equational classes of commutative semigroups have been known for some time [5]. Perkins [6] has shown that each equational class of commutative semigroups is finitely based. Recently, Schwabauer [7; 8] proved that the lattice is not modular, and described a distributive sublattice of the lattice.The present paper describes a “skeleton” sublattice of the lattice, which is isomorphic to A × N+ with a unit adjoined, where A is the lattice of pairs (r, s) of non-negative integers with r ≦ s and s ≧ 1, ordered component-wise, and N+ is the natural numbers with division.