On disjoint unions of finitely many copies of the free monogenic semigroup. (Q372354)

The free monogenic semigroup \(N_a\) is the free semigroup on one generator \(a\), and this is isomorphic to the semigroup of natural numbers with addition. A semigroup \(S\) is said to be finitely presented if it admits a presentation \(\langle A\mid R\rangle\) where both the alphabet \(A\) and the set of relations \(R\) are finite. If any distinct elements \(s\) and \(t\) in \(S\) can be separated by some finite image of \(S\), i.e. there exists a finite semigroup \(T\) and a morphism \(\Phi\) from \(S\) onto \(T\) such that \(s\Phi\neq t\Phi\), one says that \(S\) is residually finite. While the disjoint union of a finite number of finitely presented [residually finite] groups is also finitely presented [residually finite], it is known that the same may not happen if one takes semigroups. Let \(N\) be a semigroup which is the disjoint union of \(n\) subsemigroups, each one of them a copy of the free monogenic semigroup. The main result in this paper states that \(N\) is finitely presented and residually finite. The proof of the first part also provides a positive answer for the decidability of the word problem for these semigroups. To conclude the paper the authors list a number of interesting questions with respect to ``being finitely presented or residually finite''.