Products of two idempotent transformations over arbitrary sets and vector spaces

Abstract

In this paper we consider the characterisation of those elements of a transformation semigroup S which are a product of two proper idempotents. We give a characterisation where S is the endomorphism monoid of a strong independence algebra A, and apply this to the cases where A is an arbitrary set and where A is an arbitrary vector space. The results emphasise the analogy between the idempotent generated subsemigroups of the full transformation semigroup of a set and of the semigroup of linear transformations from a vector space to itself.