Related papers: On conciseness of words in profinite groups

We consider the class of groups whose word problem is poly-context-free; that is, an intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We show that any group which is virtually a finitely generated subgroup of a direct product of free…

Let G be a finite group of nilpotency class 2 and w a group word. In this short paper we show that the probability that a random n-tuple of elements from G satisfies w is at least one over the order of G. This answers a special case of a…

Let $G$ be a non-elementary hyperbolic group. Let $w$ be a group word such that the set $w[G]$ of all its values in $G$ does not coincide with $G$ or 1. We show that the width of verbal subgroup $w(G)=<w[G]>$ is infinite. That is, there is…

For $G$ a finite group, let $d_2(G)$ denote the proportion of triples $(x, y, z) \in G^3$ such that $[x, y, z] = 1$. We determine the structure of finite groups $G$ such that $d_2(G)$ is bounded away from zero: if $d_2(G) \geq \epsilon >…

A conjecture of Boone and Higman from the 1970's asserts that a finitely generated group $G$ has solvable word problem if and only if $G$ can be embedded into a finitely presented simple group. We comment on the history of this conjecture…

Let A be an alphabet and W be a set of words in the free monoid A*. Let S(W) denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of A* consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in W. We call a set of words W finitely based if the monoid…

It is proved that every finitely generated profinite group with fewer than $2^{\aleph_0}$ conjugacy classes of elements of infinite order is finite

A countable group is residually finite if every nontrivial element can act nontrivially on a finite set. When a group fails to be residually finite, we might want to measure how drastically it fails - it could be that only finitely many…

Let $\gamma_n=[x_1,\dots,x_n]$ be the $n$th lower central word. Denote by $X_n$ the set of $\gamma_n$-values in a group $G$ and suppose that there is a number $m$ such that $|g^{X_n}|\leq m$ for each $g\in G$. We prove that…

We discuss whether finiteness properties of a profinite group $G$ can be deduced from the coefficients of the probabilistic zeta function $P_G(s)$. In particular we prove that if $P_G(s)$ is rational and all but finitely many non abelian…

Let N be a normal subgroup of a finite group G. We prove that under certain (unavoidable) conditions the subgroup [N,G] is a product of commutators [N,y] (with prescribed values of y from a given set Y) of length bounded by a function of…

Given a profinite group $G$ and a family $\mathcal{F}$ of finite groups closed under taking subgroups, direct products and quotients, denote by $\mathcal{F}(G)$ the set of elements $g \in G$ such that $\{x \in G\ |\ \langle g,x \rangle \…

We prove that a finite group is rational if and only if it has a set of permutation characters which separate conjugacy classes. It follows from this that a finite group is rational if and only if it has a representation as a permutation…

A profinite group G is just infinite if every non-trivial closed normal subgroup of G is of finite index, and hereditarily just infinite if every open subgroup is just infinite. Hereditarily just infinite profinite groups need not be…

In response to questions by Kassabov, Nikolov and Shalev, we show that a given subset $A$ of a finite simple group $G$ is the image of some word map $w : G\times G\to G $ if and only if (i) $A$ contains the identity and (ii) $A$ is…

Let $F$ be a free non-abelian group. We show that for any group word $w$ the set $w[F]$ of all values of $w$ in $F$ is rational in $F$ if and only if $w[F] = 1$ or $w[F] = F.$ We generalize this to a wide class of free products of groups.

A finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is attained, the word $w$ is called rich. An infinite word $w$ is called rich if every finite factor of $w$ is rich. Let $w$ be a word…

A profinite group is called small if it has only finitely many open subgroups of index n for each positive integer n. We show that every Frattini cover of a small profinite group is small. A profinite group is called strongly complete if…

A group $G$ is said to be a $C$-group if every subgroup $H$ has a permutable complement, i.e. if there exists a subgroup $K$ of $G$ such that $G=HK$ and $H \cap K=1$. In this paper, we study the profinite counterpart of this concept. We say…

A group $G$ is said to have restricted centralizers if for each $g$ in $G$ the centralizer $C_G(g)$ either is finite or has finite index in $G$. Shalev showed that a profinite group with restricted centralizers is virtually abelian. Given a…