English

Associativity of the Commutator Operation in Groups

Group Theory 2008-06-02 v1

Abstract

The study of associativity of the commutator operation in groups goes back to some work of Levi in 1942. In the 1960's Richard J. Thompson created a group F whose elements are representatives of the generalized associative law for an arbitrary binary operation. In 2006, Geoghegan and Guzman proved that a group G is solvable if and only if the commutator operation in G eventually satisfies ALL instances of the associative law, and also showed that many non-solvable groups do not satisfy any instance of the generalized associative law. We will address the question: Is there a non-solvable group which satisfies SOME instance of the generalized associative law? For finite groups, we prove that the answer is no.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.4835,
  title  = {Associativity of the Commutator Operation in Groups},
  author = {Fernando Guzman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.4835},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

8 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:45:57.206Z