Products of idempotent linear transformations

Abstract

Synopsis In 1966, J. M. Howie characterised the transformations of an arbitrary set that can be written as a product (under composition) of idempotent transformations of the same set. In 1967, J. A. Erdos considered the analogous problem for linear transformations of a finite-dimensional vector space and in 1983, R. J. Dawlings investigated the corresponding idea for bounded operators on a separable Hilbert space. In this paper we study the case of arbitrary vector spaces.