Hyperbolicity of monoids presented by confluent monadic rewriting systems. (Q375928)

A word rewriting system is said to be monadic if it is length-reducing and all right-hand sides of rewriting rules are either the empty word or single letters. The paper reports on results on the geometry of the Cayley graphs of monoids that are presented by such confluent monadic rewriting systems. It extends results of \textit{J. Cassaigne} and \textit{P. V. Silva} [Int. J. Algebra Comput. 19, No. 4, 443-490 (2009; Zbl 1213.68477)], which deal with the particular case of so-called special rewriting systems in which only the empty word is allowed as the outcome of rewriting rules. Specifically, for a confluent monadic rewriting system, the main results of the present paper are the following: (1) if the left-hand sides of rewriting rules with each fixed right-hand side are regular languages, then, as a geodesic space, the Cayley graph is hyperbolic; (2) in case the rewriting system is finite, a description of the boundary of the Cayley graph is given as a metric space of infinite words; (3) under the assumptions of (1), the monoid presented by the rewriting system is word-hyperbolic in the sense of \textit{A. Duncan} and \textit{R. H. Gilman} [Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 136, No. 3, 513-524 (2004; Zbl 1064.20055)].