Related papers: Surface Words are Determined by Word Measures on G…

A word in a group is called a test element if any endomorphism fixing it is necessarily an automorphism. In this note, we give a sufficient condition in geometry to construct test elements for monomorphisms of a free group, by using the…

Let $w=w(x_1,...,x_n)$ be a word, i.e. an element of the free group $F = \langle x_1,...,x_n \rangle$. The verbal subgroup $w(G)$ of a group $G$ is the subgroup generated by the set $\{ w(x_1,...,x_n) : x_1,...,x_n \in G \}$ of all…

The general {\bf surface group conjecture} asks whether a one-relator group where every subgroup of finite index is again one-relator and every subgroup of infinite index is free (property IF) is a surface group. We resolve several related…

We consider random walk on a finite group $G$ as follows. We can consider $G$ as a group of substitutions. Randomly (i.e. with probability $U(g)=|G|^{-1}$ ) we choose a substitution $g \in G$ and execute it twice in a row, i.e. execute a…

Let F_m be a free group of a finite rank m > 1 and X_i, Y_j be elements in F_m. A non-empty word w(x_1,..., x_n) is called a C-test word in n letters for F_m if, whenever w(X_1,..., X_n)=w(Y_1,..., Y_n) not equal to 1, the two n-tuples…

The Surface Group Conjectures are statements about recognising surface groups among one-relator groups, using either the structure of their finite-index subgroups, or all subgroups. We resolve these conjectures in the two generator case.…

The factor complexity function $C_w(n)$ of a finite or infinite word $w$ counts the number of distinct factors of $w$ of length $n$ for each $n \ge 0$. A finite word $w$ of length $|w|$ is said to be trapezoidal if the graph of its factor…

We show that the compressed word problem in a finitely-generated fully residually free group (F -group) is decidable in polynomial time, and use the result to show that the word problem in the automorphism group of such a group is decidable…

A word in a free group is called ``potentially positive'' if it is automorphic to an element which is written with only positive exponents. We will develop automata to analyze properties of potentially positive words. We will use these to…

The density of a rational language can be understood as the frequency of some "pattern" in the shift space, for example a pattern like "words with an even number of a given letter." We study the density of group languages, i.e. rational…

We prove a result that relates the number of homomorphisms from the fundamental group of a compact nonorientable surface to a finite group $G$, where conjugacy classes of the boundary components of the surface must map to prescribed…

A word $w$ is said to be concise in a class of groups if, for every $G$ in that class such that the set of $w$-values $w\{G\}$ is finite, the verbal subgroup $w(G)$ is also finite. In the context of profinite groups, the notion of strong…

We show that an element w of a free group F on n generators defines a surjective word map of PSL(2,C)^n onto PSL(2,C) unless w belongs to the second derived subgroup of F. We also describe certain words maps that are surjective on SL(2,C) x…

Let $w\in\mathbf F_k$ be a non-trivial word and denote by $w(G)\subseteq G$ the image of the associated word map $w\colon G^k\to G$. Let $G$ be one of the finite groups ${\rm S}_n,{\rm GL}_n(q),{\rm Sp}_{2m}(q),{\rm GO}_{2m}^\pm(q),{\rm…

In this article, we study word equations in free semigroups and the conjecture that the existence of infinitely many solutions entails the existence of solutions with arbitrarily large exponent of periodicity. We examine this question in…

The degree of commutativity of a finite group is the probability that two uniformly and randomly chosen elements commute. This notion extends naturally to finitely generated groups $G$: the degree of commutativity $\text{dc}_S(G)$, with…

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…

For an abelian topological group G let G^* denote the dual group of all continuous characters endowed with the compact open topology. Given a closed subset X of an infinite compact abelian group G such that w(X) < w(G) and an open…

Work on generalizations of the Cohen-Lenstra and Cohen-Martinet heuristics has drawn attention to probability measures on the space of isomorphism classes of profinite groups. As is common in probability theory, it would be desirable to…

Given two functions $\mathbf{a}\!:\! [n] \rightarrow [n]$ and $\mathbf{b}\!:\! [n] \rightarrow [n]$ chosen uniformly at random, any word $w=w_1w_2\dots w_k\in \{a,b\}^k$ induces a random function $\mathbf{w}\!:\! [n] \rightarrow [n]$ by…