In this article, we study the recent development of the qualitative uncertainty principle on certain Lie groups. In particular, we consider that if the Weyl transform on certain step-two nilpotent Lie groups is of finite rank, then the function has to be zero almost everywhere as long as the nonvanishing set for the function has finite measure. Further, we consider that if the Weyl transform of each Fourier–Wigner piece of a suitable function on the Heisenberg motion group is of finite rank, then the function has to be zero almost everywhere whenever the nonvanishing set for each Fourier–Wigner piece has finite measure.

Let H be the Hermite operator $-\Delta +|x|^2$ on $\mathbb {R}^n$. We prove a weighted $L^2$ estimate of the maximal commutator operator $\sup _{R>0}|[b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f)|$, where $ [b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f) = bS_R^\lambda (H) f - S_R^\lambda (H)(bf) $ is the commutator of a BMO function b and the Bochner–Riesz means $S_R^\lambda (H)$ for the Hermite operator H. As an application, we obtain the almost everywhere convergence of $[b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f)$ for large $\lambda $ and $f\in L^p(\mathbb {R}^n)$.

A notion of normal submonoid of a monoid M is introduced that generalizes the normal subgroups of a group. When ordered by inclusion, the set $\mathsf {NorSub}(M)$ of normal submonoids of M is a complete lattice. Joins are explicitly described and the lattice is computed for the finite full transformation monoids $T_n$, $n\geq ~1$. It is also shown that $\mathsf {NorSub}(M)$ is modular for a specific family of commutative monoids, including all Krull monoids, and that it, as a join semilattice, embeds isomorphically onto a join subsemilattice of the lattice $\mathsf {Cong}(M)$ of congruences on M. This leads to a new strategy for computing $\mathsf {Cong}(M)$ consisting of computing $\mathsf {NorSub}(M)$ and the so-called unital congruences on the quotients of M modulo its normal submonoids. This provides a new perspective on Malcev’s computation of the congruences on $T_n$.

We prove that, given a finitely generated subgroup H of a free group F, the following questions are decidable: is H closed (dense) in F for the pro-(met)abelian topology? Is the closure of H in F for the pro-(met)abelian topology finitely generated? We show also that if the latter question has a positive answer, then we can effectively construct a basis for the closure, and the closure has decidable membership problem in any case. Moreover, it is decidable whether H is closed for the pro-$\mathbf {V}$ topology when $\mathbf {V}$ is an equational pseudovariety of finite groups, such as the pseudovariety $\mathbf {S}_k$ of all finite solvable groups with derived length $\leq k$. We also connect the pro-abelian topology with the topologies defined by abelian groups of bounded exponent.

The complex algebra of an inverse semigroup with finitely many idempotents in each $\mathcal D$-class is stably finite by a result of Munn. This can be proved fairly easily using $C^{*}$-algebras for inverse semigroups satisfying this condition that have a Hausdorff universal groupoid, or more generally for direct limits of inverse semigroups satisfying this condition and having Hausdorff universal groupoids. It is not difficult to see that a finitely presented inverse semigroup with a non-Hausdorff universal groupoid cannot be a direct limit of inverse semigroups with Hausdorff universal groupoids. We construct here countably many nonisomorphic finitely presented inverse semigroups with finitely many idempotents in each $\mathcal D$-class and non-Hausdorff universal groupoids. At this time, there is not a clear $C^{*}$-algebraic technique to prove these inverse semigroups have stably finite complex algebras.