Related papers: Commutator width in Chevalley groups

This is a survey of two papers joint with A. Borisov and a paper joint with I. Spakulova. It is based on my lectures at the conference "Groups St. Andrews 2009", Bath (August 2009). We prove that almost all 1-related groups with at least 3…

Let G be a finite group. It has recently been proved that every nontrivial element of G is contained in a generating set of minimal size if and only if all proper quotients of G require fewer generators than G. It is natural to ask which…

In this paper we prove that every automorphism of a Chevalley group (or its elementary subgroup) with root system of rank >1 over a commutative ring (with 1/2 for the systems A_2, F_4, B_l, C_l; with 1/2 and 1/3 for the system G_2) is…

Given a Chevalley group ${\mathbf G}(q)$ and a parabolic subgroup $P\subset {\mathbf G}(q)$, we prove that for any set $A$ there is a certain growth of $A$ relatively to $P$, namely, either $AP$ or $PA$ is much larger than $A$. Also, we…

We show that a finitely generated soluble group is virtually nilpotent if and only if the diameter of its finite coset spaces admits a uniform polynomial lower bound in terms of their size. We obtain the same conclusion for certain finitely…

This note constructs a finitely generated group $W$ whose word-growth is exponential, but for which the infimum of the growth rates over all finite generating sets is 1 -- in other words, of non-uniformly exponential growth. This answers a…

We prove that the nilpotent product of a set of groups $A_{1},\dots, A_{s}$ has finite palindromic width if and only if the palindromic widths of $A_{i}, i=1,\dots, s,$ are finite. We give a new proof that the commutator width of $F_n \wr…

The notion of commutator width of a group, defined as the smallest number of commutators needed to represent each element of the derived group as their product, has been extensively studied over the past decades. In particular, in 1992…

The commuting graph of a group $G$ is the simple undirected graph whose vertices are the non-central elements of $G$ and two distinct vertices are adjacent if and only if they commute. It is conjectured by Jafarzadeh and Iranmanesh that…

We study how the spectral gap and diameter of Cayley graphs depend strongly on the choice of generating set. We answer a question of Pyber and Szab\'o (2013) by exhibiting a sequence of finite groups $G_n$ with $|G_n| \to \infty$ admitting…

By now, we have a product theorem in every finite simple group $G$ of Lie type, with the strength of the bound depending only in the rank of $G$. Such theorems have numerous consequences: bounds on the diameters of Cayley graphs, spectral…

We show that if all the finite coset spaces of a polycyclic group have diameter bounded uniformly below by a polynomial in their size then the group is virtually nilpotent. We obtain the same conclusion for a finitely generated residually…

An arbitrary homomorphism between groups is nonincreasing for stable commutator length, and there are infinitely many (injective) homomorphisms between free groups which strictly decrease the stable commutator length of some elements.…

We provide a general structural criterion implying that a group has infinite $m$-almost palindromic width. In particular, we prove that both HNN extensions and free products exhibit infinite $m$-almost palindromic width, with the unique…

In this paper, we prove two structure theorems for twisted Chevalley groups $G_\sigma (R)$ over a commutative ring $R$ with unity. The first theorem concerns the normality of $E'_\sigma (R,J)$, the elementary congruence subgroups at level…

We investigate the palindromic width of finitely generated solvable groups. We prove that every finitely generated $3$-step solvable group has finite palindromic width. More generally, we show the finiteness of palindromic width for…

The width $\wid(G,W)$ of the verbal subgroup $v(G,W)$ of a group $G$ defined by a collection of group words $W$ is the smallest number $m$ in $\mathbb N \cup {+\infty}$ such that every element of $v(G,W)$ is can be represented as the…

Every mathematician is familiar with the beautiful structure of finite commutative groups. What is less well known is that finite commutative semigroups also have a neat and well-described structure. We prove this in an efficient fashion.…

The dead-end depth of an element g of a group G, with respect to a generating set A is the distance from g to the complement of the radius $d_A(1,g)$ closed ball, in the word metric $d_A$ defined with respect to A. We exhibit a finitely…

We study the geometry of compact geodesic spaces with trivial first Betti number admitting large finite groups of isometries. We show that if a finite group $G$ acts by isometries on a compact geodesic space $X$ whose first Betti number…