On Idempotent Ranks of Semigroups of Partial Transformations

A subset U of a semigroup S is a generating set for S if every element of S may be written as a finite product of elements of U. The rank of S is the size of a minimal generating set of S, and the idempotent rank of S is the size of a minimal generating set of S consisting of idempotents in S. A partition of a q-element subset of the set X_n={1,2,..., n} is said to be of type if the sizes of its classes form the partition of q n. A non-trivial partition of a positive integer q consists of k < q elements. For a non-trivial partition of q n, the semigroup S(), generated by all the transformations with kernels of type , is idempotent-generated. It is known that if is a non-trivial partition of n, that is, S() consists of total many-to-one transformations, then the rank and the idempotent rank of S() are both equal to max{ⁿ_d, N()}, where N() is the number of partitions of X_n of type . We extend this result to semigroups of partial transformations, and prove that if is a non-trivial partition of q < n, then the rank and the idempotent rank of S() are both equal to N().