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We show that the free weakly E-ample monoid on a set X is a full submonoid of the free inverse monoid FIM(X) on X. Consequently, it is ample, and so coincides with both the free weakly ample and the free ample monoid FAM(X) on X. We introduce the notion of a semidirect product Y*T of a monoid T acting doubly on a semilattice Y with identity. We argue that the free monoid X* acts doubly on the semilattice [Formula: see text] of idempotents of FIM(X) and that FAM(X) is embedded in [Formula: see text]. Finally we show that every weakly E-ample monoid has a proper ample cover.

It is well-known (see [2]) that the finite symmetric group Sn has rank 2. Specifically, it is known that the cyclic permutationsgenerate Sn,. It easily follows (and has been observed by Vorob'ev [9]) that the full transformation semigroup on n (< ∞) symbols has rank 3, being generated by the two generators of Sn, together with an arbitrarily chosen element of defect 1. (See Clifford and Preston [1], example 1.1.10.) The rank of Singn, the semigroup of all singular self-maps of {1, …, n}, is harder to determine: in Section 2 it is shown to be ½n(n − 1) (for n ≽ 3). The semigroup Singn it is known to be generated by idempotents [4] and so it is possible to define the idempotent rank of Singn as the cardinality of the smallest possible set P of idempotents for which <F> = Singn. This is of course potentially greater than the rank, but in fact the two numbers turn out to be equal.

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