Ideals are greater on the left (Q583381)

Although there may be some who regard it as blatant propaganda from the Union of Socialist Semigroup Researchers, the title of this note will amuse many mathematicians. Those who are persuaded to examine the work itself will find two results on the cardinality of the left and right ideals generated by an element of the full transformation semigroup on a finite set. The first result involves the use of some elementary combinatorics, the second some elementary calculus. As the authors point out in the latter case ``it is not often that elementary calculus plays a role in semigroup theory.''