English

Virtually geometric words and Whitehead's algorithm

Group Theory 2010-12-07 v3 Geometric Topology

Abstract

Motivated by a question of Gordon and Wilton, we consider the question of which collections of words are "virtually geometric". In particular, we prove that some words (e.g. bbaaccabc) are not virtually geometric.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0904.0724,
  title  = {Virtually geometric words and Whitehead's algorithm},
  author = {Jason Fox Manning},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.0724},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figures. (v2) Corrected statement of Theorem 2.4, and rewrote Remark 1.5 slightly (v3) Some improvements to the exposition and expansion of some remarks suggested by the referee

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:48:12.093Z