The cardinalities of the Green classes of the free objects in varieties of bands (Q1185771)

One of the earliest signs that the study of bands would be fruitful was the determination of the structure of free bands, at the beginning of the 1950's. The calculation of the cardinalities of the finitely generated free bands was accomplished by computing the sizes of their \(\mathcal D\)- classes. Some twenty years later the lattice of varieties of bands was determined independently by three authors. A similar interval has elapsed until the sizes of the \(\mathcal D\)-classes of the corresponding relatively free bands have been studied in generality. This is achieved in this paper by means of recursion relations; a simplifying step was to reduce the general computations to those for the join irreducible varieties. A similar analysis is carried out for the varieties of band monoids.