Related papers: The triviality problem for profinite completions
We address the question of whether the property of being virtually special (in the sense of Haglund and Wise) is algorithmically decidable for finite, non-positively curved cube complexes. Our main theorem shows that it cannot be decided…
We prove that the complex surfaces parametrizing cuboids and face cuboids, as well as their minimal resolution of singularities, have trivial fundamental group. We then compute the fundamental group of certain open smooth subvarieties of…
We construct the first examples of an algorithmically complex finitely presented residually finite groups and first examples of finitely presented residually finite groups with arbitrarily large (recursive) Dehn function and depth function.…
We consider finitely presented,residually finite groups $G$ and finitely generated normal subgroups $A$ such that the inclusion $A\hookrightarrow G$ induces an isomorphism from the profinite completion of $A$ to a direct factor of the…
It is shown that various questions about the existence of simple closed curves in normal subgroups of surface groups are undecidable.
We consider classes of fundamental groups of complements of various kinds of codimension 2 embeddings and show that, in general, the problem of deciding whether or not a group in one class belongs to a smaller class is algorithmically…
We investigate whether a finitely generated profinite group G could have a finitely generated infinite image. A result of Dan Segal shows that this is impossible if G is prosoluble. We prove that such an image does not exist if G is…
In this paper we begin the systematic study of group equations with abelian predicates in the main classes of groups where solving equations is possible. We extend the line of work on word equations with length constraints, and more…
We consider several types of non-existence theorems for functors. For example, there are no nontrivial functors from the category of groups (or the category of pointed sets, or vector spaces) to any small category. Another type of questions…
We prove, for every non-virtually free hyperbolic group $G$, that there is no algorithm that, given a finite collection of dominoes, determines whether the Cayley graph of $G$ may be edge-covered by these dominoes so that colours match at…
In this article we survey recent progress in the algorithmic theory of matrix semigroups. The main objective in this area of study is to construct algorithms that decide various properties of finitely generated subsemigroups of an infinite…
We describe an algorithm which determines whether or not a group which is hyperbolic relative to abelian groups admits a nontrivial splitting over a finite group.
We show that there exists an algorithm to decide any single equation in the Heisenberg group in finite time. The method works for all two-step nilpotent groups with rank-one commutator, which includes the higher Heisenberg groups. We also…
Examples are given of profinite groups that are not strongly complete, and have other `bad' properties, yet have only finitely many open subgroups of each finite index. It is shown that a profinite group with the latter property must be…
We show that the Diophantine problem(decidability of equations) is undecidable in free associative algebras over any field and in the group algebras over any field of a wide variety of torsion free groups, including toral relatively…
Profinite algebras are exactly those that are isomorphic to inverse limits of finite algebras. Such algebras are naturally equipped with Boolean topologies. A variety $\mathcal V$ is standard if every Boolean topological algebra with the…
We construct and study finitely presented groups with quadratic Dehn function (QD-groups) and present the following applications of the method developed in our recent papers. (1) The isomorphism problem is undecidable in the class of…
This is a report on our long term project to find an algorithm to decide if a finitely presented group has a non-trivial action on a tree.
The Equation Problem in finitely presented groups asks if there exists an algorithm which determines in finite amount of time whether any given equation system has a solution or not. We show that the Equation Problem in central extensions…
We consider whether given a simple, finite description of a group in the form of an algorithm, it is possible to algorithmically determine if the corresponding group has some specified property or not. When there is such an algorithm, we…