Related papers: Residually free groups do not admit a uniform poly…

Subgroups of direct products of finitely many finitely generated free groups form a natural class that plays an important role in geometric group theory. Its members include fundamental examples, such as the Stallings-Bieri groups. This…

We establish a general criterion for the finite presentability of subdirect products of groups and use this to characterize finitely presented residually free groups. We prove that, for all $n\in\mathbb{N}$, a residually free group is of…

In this thesis we investigate the Dehn functions of two different classes of groups: subdirect products, in particular subdirect products of limit groups; and Bestvina-Brady groups. Let D = \Gamma_1 \times ... \times \Gamma_n be a direct…

We construct easy embeddings of relatively free groups (say the free Burnside group, the free solvable group) into finitely presented groups. We introduce a concept of verbal isoperimetric function of a group variety. We prove that if the…

We exhibit classes of groups in which the word problem is uniformly solvable but in which there is no algorithm that can compute finite presentations for finitely presentable subgroups. Direct products of hyperbolic groups, groups of…

For each group G which decomposes into a finitary direct product of free groups of finite rank we construct a regular band B such that the free idempotent generated semigroup over B contains a maximal subgroup isomorphic to G. In…

We establish a cubic lower bound on the Dehn function of a certain finitely presented subgroup of a direct product of 3 free groups.

We prove that the Bridson-Dison group has quartic Dehn function, thereby providing the first precise computation of the Dehn function of a subgroup of a direct product of free groups with super-quadratic Dehn function. We also prove that…

A polynomial-time algorithm is produced which, given generators for a group of permutations on a finite set, returns a direct product decomposition of the group into directly indecomposable subgroups. The process uses bilinear maps and…

We develop new methods for computing the precise Dehn functions of coabelian subgroups of direct products of groups, that is, subgroups which arise as kernels of homomorphisms from the direct product onto a free abelian group. These improve…

We construct a finitely generated residually finite group $G$ with the property that every finite index subgroup of $G$ contains a subgroup isomorphic to Promislow's group. Hence $G$ does not have a finite index subgroup with the unique…

Let $R$ be a finite commutative ring with $1\ne 0$. The set $\mathcal{F}(R)$ of polynomial functions on $R$ is a finite commutative ring with pointwise operations. Its group of units $\mathcal{F}(R)^\times$ is just the set of all…

It is shown that there exist infinitely many non-integers $r>2$ such that the Dehn function of some finitely presented group is $\simeq n^r$. For each positive rational number $s$ we construct pairs of finitely presented groups $H\subset G$…

Let $\Gamma$ be a finite graph, and for each vertex $i$ let $G_i$ be a finitely presented group. Let $G$ be the graph product of the $G_i$. That is, $G$ is the group obtained from the free product of the $G_i$ by factoring out by the…

To each finitely generated group $G$, we associate a quasi-isometric invariant called the \emph{Dehn spectrum} of $G$. If $G$ is finitely presented, our invariant is closely related to the Dehn function of $G$, but provides more information…

We investigate the structure of subdirect products of groups, particularly their finiteness properties. We pay special attention to the subdirect products of free groups, surface groups and HNN extensions. We prove that a finitely presented…

We describe a general technique for embedding certain amalgamated products into direct products. This technique provides us with a way of constructing a host of finitely presented subgroups of automatic groups which are not even…

We exhibit examples of finitely presented subgroups $P$ of direct products of hyperbolic groups for which there is no algorithm that detects whether a finitely presented group has a quotient isomorphic to $P$. For any torsion-free, linear,…

It is an old and challenging topic to investigate for which discrete groups G the full group C*-algebra C*(G) is residually finite-dimensional (RFD). In particular not much is known about how the RFD property behaves under fundamental…

We construct a group (an HNN extension of a free group) with polynomial isoperimetric function, linear isodiametric function and non-simply connected asymptotic cones.