On the set of elasticities in numerical monoids

Abstract

In an atomic, cancellative, commutative monoid $S$, the elasticity of an element provides a coarse measure of its non-unique factorizations by comparing the largest and smallest values in its set of factorization lengths (called its length set). In this paper, we show that the set of length sets $\mathcal L(S)$ for any arithmetical numerical monoid $S$ can be completely recovered from its set of elasticities $R(S)$; therefore, $R(S)$ is as strong a factorization invariant as $\mathcal L(S)$ in this setting. For general numerical monoids, we describe the set of elasticities as a specific collection of monotone increasing sequences with a common limit point of $\max R(S)$.