Related papers: On commutator length in free groups

Let $w$ be a word in a free group. As was revealed by Magee and Puder in [arXiv:1802.04862], the stable commutator length (scl) of $w$, a well-known topological invariant, can also be defined in terms of certain stable Fourier coefficients…

We show that stable commutator length is rational on free products of free Abelian groups amalgamated over $\mathbb{Z}^k$, a class of groups containing the fundamental groups of all torus knot complements. We consider a geometric model for…

In this paper we obtain uniform positive lower bounds on stable commutator length in word-hyperbolic groups and certain groups acting on hyperbolic spaces (namely the mapping class group acting on the complex of curves, and an amalgamated…

A group-word w is called concise if whenever the set of w-values in a group G is finite it always follows that the verbal subgroup w(G) is finite. More generally, a word w is said to be concise in a class of groups X if whenever the set of…

We study stable commutator length (scl) in free products via surface maps into a wedge of spaces. We prove that scl is piecewise rational linear if it vanishes on each factor of the free product, generalizing the main result in Danny…

We consider space functions $s(n)$ of finitely presented groups $G =< A\mid R> .$ (These functions have a natural geometric analog.) To define $s(n)$ we start with a word $w$ over $A$ of length at most $n$ equal to 1 in $G$ and use…

A group $G$ has cube-free order if no prime to the third power divides $|G|$. We describe an algorithm that given two cube-free groups $G$ and $H$ of known order, decides whether $G\cong H$, and, if so, constructs an isomorphism $G\to H$.…

A longstanding question of Gromov asks whether every one-ended word-hyperbolic group contains a subgroup isomorphic to the fundamental group of a closed hyperbolic surface. An infinite family of word-hyperbolic groups can be obtained by…

It is well known that a nontrivial commutator in a free group is never a proper power. We prove a theorem that generalizes this fact and has several worthwhile corollaries. For example, an equation $[ x_1, y_1] \ldots [ x_k, y_k] = z^n$,…

Let $g$ be an element of a finite group $G$. For a positive integer $n$, let $E_n(g)$ be the subgroup generated by all commutators $[...[[x,g],g],\dots,g]$ over $x\in G$, where $g$ is repeated $n$ times. By Baer's theorem, if $E_n(g)=1$,…

We prove a rigidity theorem for the geometry of the unit ball in random subspaces of the scl norm in B_1^H of a free group. In a free group F of rank k, a random word w of length n (conditioned to lie in [F,F]) has scl(w)=log(2k-1)n/6log(n)…

In this text, we consider random permutations which can be written as free words in several independent random permutations: firstly, we fix a non trivial word $w$ in letters $g_1,g_1^{-1},..., g_k,g_k^{-1}$, secondly, for all $n$, we…

We study the complexity of computation in finitely generated free left, right and two-sided adequate semigroups and monoids. We present polynomial time (quadratic in the RAM model of computation) algorithms to solve the word problem and…

Frobenius observed that the number of times an element of a finite group is obtained as a commutator is given by a specific combination of the irreducible characters of the group. More generally, for any word w the number of times an…

We study the impact of certain identities and probabilistic identities on the structure of finite groups. More specifically, let $w$ be a nontrivial word in $d$ distinct variables and let $G$ be a finite group for which the word map…

Let u be a cyclic word in a free group F_n of finite rank n that has the minimum length over all cyclic words in its automorphic orbit, and let N(u) be the cardinality of the set {v: |v|=|u| and v= \phi(u) for some \phi \in \text {Aut}F_n}.…

Kaplanski's Zero Divisor Conjecture envisions that for a torsion-free group G and an integral domain R, the group ring R[G] does not contain non-trivial zero divisors. We define the length of an element a in R[G] as the minimal non-negative…

A $c$-short program for a string $x$ is a description of $x$ of length at most $C(x) + c$, where $C(x)$ is the Kolmogorov complexity of $x$. We show that there exists a randomized algorithm that constructs a list of $n$ elements that…

Given a word $w(x_{1},\ldots,x_{r})$, i.e., an element in the free group on $r$ elements, and an integer $d\geq1$, we study the characteristic polynomial of the random matrix $w(X_{1},\ldots,X_{r})$, where $X_{i}$ are Haar-random…

We establish new characterizations of primitive elements and free factors in free groups, which are based on the distributions they induce on finite groups. For every finite group $G$, a word $w$ in the free group on $k$ generators induces…