Faithful functors from cancellative categories to cancellative monoids with an application to abundant semigroups

摘要

We prove that any small cancellative category admits a faithful functor to a cancellative monoid. We use our result to show that any primitive ample semigroup is a full subsemigroup of a Rees matrix semigroup M-0 (M; I, I; P) where M is a cancellative monoid and P is the identity matrix. On the other hand a consequence of a recent result of Steinberg is that it is undecidable whether a finite ample semigroup embeds as a full subsemigroup of an inverse semigroup.