On morphisms of commutative monoids. (Q444650)

This paper gives tools to handle morphisms between commutative monoids. A morphism between commutative monoids is fully determined by the images of a set of generators of the domain. In the first section the converse situation is studied, that is, when an assignment of images of the generators of a commutative monoid yields a monoid morphism. Also, some relations between morphisms of commutative monoids and morphisms between their associated cancellative monoids are stated. The second section is devoted to finitely generated commutative monoids. From presentations of the domain and codomain of a monoid morphism, the authors give algorithms for computing a presentation of its image, determine if the morphism is injective and/or surjective. The last section gives a representation of the monoid of homomorphisms between finitely generated cancellative monoids in the case the codomain is cancellative. A procedure is presented to find a finite set of matrices with nonnegative integer coefficients that generate, modulo a certain known relation, an additive monoid isomorphic to \(\Hom(S,S')\) from a presentation of \(S\) and \(S'\). The manuscript under review contains many examples illustrating the algorithms presented.