Irreducible numerical semigroups. (Q1880034)

A numerical semigroup is said to be irreducible whenever it can not be expressed as an intersection of two numerical semigroups containing it properly. The paper under review studies several aspects of these semigroups. In Section 1, the authors give a characterization of irreducible semigroups in terms of their Frobenius number. Explicit generators for irreducible numerical semigroups can be found in Section 3 for those whose multiplicity is 3 or 4. Recall that the multiplicity of a numerical semigroup is the lowest generator of its unique minimal system of generators. This concept is very related to the so called embedding dimension, which is the number of generators of the above mentioned minimal system of generators. Finally, Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to bound the cardinality of minimal presentations for irreducible numerical semigroups and to study some properties of the irreducible numerical semigroups with maximal embedding dimension, respectively.