Centralising monoids with low-arity witnesses on a four-element set

Abstract

As part of a project to identify all maximal centralising monoids on a four-element set, we determine all centralising monoids witnessed by unary or by idempotent binary operations on a four-element set. Moreover, we show that every centralising monoid on a set with at least four elements witnessed by the Maľcev operation of a Boolean group operation is always a maximal centralising monoid, i.e., a co-atom below the full transformation monoid. On the other hand, we also prove that centralising monoids witnessed by certain types of permutations or retractive operations can never be maximal.