On the growth of generating sets for direct powers of semigroups

Abstract

For a semigroup S its d-sequence is d(S) = (d1, d2, d3, . . .), where di is the smallest number of elements needed to generate the ith direct power of S. In this paper we present a number of facts concerning the type of growth d(S) can have when S is an infinite semigroup, comparing them with the corresponding known facts for infinite groups, and also for finite groups and semigroups.