Inverse Semigroup - Origins

Origins

Inverse semigroups were introduced independently by Viktor Vladimirovich Wagner in the Soviet Union in 1952, and by Gordon Preston in Great Britain in 1954. Both authors arrived at inverse semigroups via the study of partial one-one transformations of a set: a partial transformation α of a set X is a function from A to B, where A and B are subsets of X. Let α and β be partial transformations of a set X; α and β can be composed (from left to right) on the largest domain upon which it "makes sense" to compose them:

dom αβ = α−1

where α−1 denotes the preimage under α. Partial transformations had already been studied in the context of pseudogroups. It was Wagner, however, who was the first to observe that the composition of partial transformations is a special case of the multiplication of binary relations. He recognised also that the domain of composition of two partial transformations may be the empty set, so he introduced an empty transformation to take account of this. With the addition of this empty transformation, the composition of partial transformations of a set becomes an everywhere-defined associative binary operation. Under this composition, the collection of all partial one-one transformations of a set X forms an inverse semigroup, called the symmetric inverse semigroup (or monoid) on X. This is the "archetypal" inverse semigroup, in the same way that a symmetric group is the archetypal group. For example, just as every group can be embedded in a symmetric group, every inverse semigroup can be embedded in a symmetric inverse semigroup (see below).