Characterization of Gaps and Elements of a Numerical Semigroup Using Groebner Bases

This article is partly a survey and partly a research paper. It tackles the use of Groebner bases for addressing problems of numerical semigroups, which is a topic that has been around for some years, but it does it in a systematic way which enables us to prove some results and a hopefully interesting characterization of the elements of a semigroup in terms of Groebner bases.