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Benjamin Steinberg
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The way to think about this is since S has no zero its minimal ideal inon-trivial. If it is not the whole semigroup you can factor out the minimal ideal to get a non trivial congruence.

So S must be its minimal ideal. An easy consequence of Rees's theorem is that Greens relations L and R are congruences on a finite simple semigroup. When you factor out L you get a right zero semigroup. Thus either S is a right zero semigroup or has a single L-class. Every equivalence relation on a right zero semigroup is a congruence. Since your semigroup has more than two elements it cannot be a right zero semigroup. So there is one L-class.

Dually there is one R-class. Thus S is a group and hence a simple group.

Now you should check if S has a zero and more than two elements then it must be a Rees Matrix semigroup over the trivial group with sandwich matrix containing no equal rows or columns and no zero rows or columns.

Benjamin Steinberg
  • 38.6k
  • 3
  • 104
  • 186