ABSTRACT
A semigroup is a set S together with an associative binary operation. In the context of social relations, the set S is generally taken to be a set of binary social relations on an underlying set E of people or sets of people, and the associative operation is taken to be the composition of relations. While the theory of semigroups is full of rich ideas and results that may have intriguing and useful applications in social networks, there are a number of common pitfalls along the way. I have used four guidelines to try to avoid these pitfalls.
