Related papers: Groups with few maximal sum-free sets
We construct finitely generated torsion-free solvable groups $G$ that have infinite rank, but such that all finitely generated torsion-free metabelian subquotients of $G$ are virtually abelian. In particular all finitely generated…
Suppose $G$ is a finite abelian group and $S$ is a sequence of elements in $G$. For any element $g$ of $G$, let $N_g(S)$ denote the number of subsequences of $S$ with sum $g$. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lower bound for…
Generalising a previous result, we determine all non-abelian finite simple groups whose order has largest prime divisor not exceeding $10^4$. The computer code for this and similar calculations is made available.
Let $G$ be an additive finite abelian group of order $n$, and let $S$ be a sequence of $n+k$ elements in $G$, where $k\geq 1$. Suppose that $S$ contains $t$ distinct elements. Let $\sum_n(S)$ denote the set that consists of all elements in…
Let $G=(\mathbb Z/n\mathbb Z) \oplus (\mathbb Z/n\mathbb Z)$. Let $\mathsf {s}_{\leq k}(G)$ be the smallest integer $\ell$ such that every sequence of $\ell$ terms from $G$, with repetition allowed, has a nonempty zero-sum subsequence with…
A set $B$ is said to be \emph{sum-free} if there are no $x,y,z\in B$ with $x+y=z$. We show that there exists a constant $c>0$ such that any set $A$ of $n$ integers contains a sum-free subset $A'$ of size $|A'|\geqslant n/3+c\log \log n$.…
T. De Medts, Y. Segev and K. Tent [Special Moufang sets, their root groups and their \mu-maps, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 96 (2008), 767-791] proved that the little projective group of a special Moufang set M(U,\tau) is perfect provided…
Let $\ell$ and $m$ be positive integers with $\ell \leq m$, and let $\mathcal{A} = (A_1, \ldots, A_m)$ be a finite sequence of finite subsets of a group $G$ (not necessarily abelian), written multiplicatively. The {\it generalized product…
For a set $A$ of $k$ elements from an additive abelian group $G$ and a positive integer $r \leq k$, we consider the set of elements of $G$ that can be written as a sum of $h$ elements of $A$ with at least $r$ distinct elements. We denote…
For a given m>=1, we consider the finite non-abelian groups G for which |C_G(g):<g>|<=m for every g in G\Z(G). We show that the order of G can be bounded in terms of m and the largest prime divisor of the order of G. Our approach relies on…
In this paper, we prove a series of results on group embeddings in groups with a small number of generators. We show that each finitely generated group $G$ lying in a variety ${\mathcal M}$ can be embedded in a $4$-generated group $H \in…
A set A of integers is said to be sum-free if there are no solutions to the equation x + y = z with x,y and z all in A. Answering a question of Cameron and Erdos, we show that the number of sum-free subsets of {1,...,N} is O(2^(N/2)).
Let $G$ be a finite group and $S$ a subset of $G$. Then $S$ is {\em product-free} if $S \cap SS = \emptyset$, and $S$ {\em fills} $G$ if $G^{\ast} \subseteq S \cup SS$. A product-free set is locally maximal if it is not contained in a…
The set $\mathcal{R}_{G}(h,k)$ consists of all possible sizes for the $h$-fold sumset of sets containing $k$ elements from an additive abelian group $G$. The exact makeup of this set is still unknown, but there has been progress towards…
We develop a new criterion to tell if a group $G$ has the maximal gap of $1/2$ in stable commutator length (scl). For amalgamated free products $G = A \star_C B$ we show that every element $g$ in the commutator subgroup of $G$ which does…
We describe groups elementarily equivalent to a free metabelian group with n generators. We also explore an exponentiation that naturally occurs in metabelian groups.
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…
Let $G\cong C_{n_1}\oplus ... \oplus C_{n_r}$ be a finite and nontrivial abelian group with $n_1|n_2|...|n_r$. A conjecture of Hamidoune says that if $W=w_1... w_n$ is a sequence of integers, all but at most one relatively prime to $|G|$,…
We study the number of $s$-element subsets $J$ of a given abelian group $G$, such that $|J+J|\leq K|J|$. Proving a conjecture of Alon, Balogh, Morris and Samotij, and improving a result of Green and Morris, who proved the conjecture for $K$…
Suppose that G is a nontrivial torsion-free group and w is a word over the alphabet G\cup\{x_1^{\pm1},...,x_n^{\pm1}\}. It is proved that for n\ge2 the group \~G=<G,x_1,x_2,...,x_n | w=1> always contains a nonabelian free subgroup. For n=1…