Factorization under Local Finiteness Conditions

Abstract: It has been recently observed that fundamental aspects of the classical theory of factorization can be greatly generalized by combining the languages of monoids and preorders. This has led to various theorems on the existence of certain factorizations, herein called $\preceq$-factorizations, for the $\preceq$-non-units of a (multiplicatively written) monoid $H$ endowed with a preorder $\preceq$, where an element $u \in H$ is a $\preceq$-unit if $u \preceq 1_H \preceq u$ and a $\preceq$-non-unit otherwise. The building blocks'' of these factorizations are the $\preceq$-irreducibles of $H$ (i.e., the $\preceq$-non-units $a \in H$ that cannot be written as a product of two $\preceq$-non-units each of which is strictly $\preceq$-smaller than $a$); and it is interesting to look for sufficient conditions for the $\preceq$-factorizations of a $\preceq$-non-unit to be bounded in length or finite in number (if measured or counted in a suitable way). This is precisely the kind of questions addressed in the present work, whose main novelty is the study of the interaction between minimal $\preceq$-factorizations (i.e., a refinement of $\preceq$-factorizations used to counter theblow-up phenomena'' that are inherent to factorization in non-commutative or non-cancellative monoids) and some finiteness conditions describing the ``local behaviour'' of the pair $(H, \preceq)$. Besides a number of examples and remarks, the paper includes many arithmetic results, a part of which are new already in the basic case where $\preceq$ is the divisibility preorder on $H$ (and hence in the setup of the classical theory).