Cancellative semigroup

In mathematics, a cancellative semigroup (also called a cancellation semigroup) is a semigroup having the cancellation property.^[1] In intuitive terms, the cancellation property asserts that from an equality of the form a·b = a·c, where · is a binary operation, one can cancel the element a and deduce the equality b = c. In this case the element being cancelled out is appearing as the left factors of a·b and a·c and hence it is a case of the left cancellation property. The right cancellation property can be defined analogously. Prototypical examples of cancellative semigroups are the positive integers under addition or multiplication. Cancellative semigroups are considered to be very close to being groups because cancellability is one of the necessary conditions for a semigroup to be embeddable in a group. Moreover, every finite cancellative semigroup is a group. One of the main problems associated with the study of cancellative semigroups is to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for embedding a cancellative semigroup in a group.

The origins of the study of cancellative semigroups can be traced to the first substantial paper on semigroups, (Suschkewitsch 1928).^[2]