J Austral Math Soc Ser A 53 pp166--182, 1992.
(Received 20 August 1990)
This paper is concerned with a new notion of coherency for monoids. A monoid S is right coherent if the first order theory of right S-sets is coherent; this is equivalent to the property that every finitely generated S-subset of every finitely presented right S-set is finitely presented. If every finitely generated right ideal of S is finitely presented we say that S is weakly right coherent. As for the corresponding situation for modules over a ring, we show that our notion of coherency is related to products of flat left S-sets, although there are some marked differences in behaviour from the case of rings. Further, we relate our work to ultraproducts of flat left S-sets and so to the question of axiomatisablility of certain classes of left S-sets. We show that a monoid S is weakly right coherent if and only if the right annihilator congruence of every element is finitely generated and the intersection of any two finitely generated right ideals is finitely generated. A similar result describes right coherent monoids. We use these descriptions to recognise several classes of (weakly) right coherent monoids. In particular we show that any free monoid is weakly right (and left) coherent and any free commutative monoid is right (and left) coherent.
1991 AMS Subject Classification: 20M10
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