Related papers: Probability of generation by random permutations o…
We give an easily checkable algebraic condition which implies that two elements of a finitely generated free group are members of distinct doubly-twisted conjugacy classes with respect to a pair of homomorphisms. We further show that this…
A group $G$ is said to be $\frac{3}{2}$-generated if every nontrivial element belongs to a generating pair. It is easy to see that if $G$ has this property then every proper quotient of $G$ is cyclic. In this paper we prove that the…
It is well known that every finite simple group can be generated by two elements and this leads to a wide range of problems that have been the focus of intensive research in recent years. In this survey article we discuss some of the…
Famously, every finite simple group $G$ can be generated by a pair of elements. Moreover, Liebeck and Shalev (1995) proved that the probability that a pair of elements generate $G$ tends to $1$ as $|G| \to \infty$. More generally, work of…
Limiting distributions are derived for the sparse connected components that are present when a random graph on $n$ vertices has approximately $\half n$ edges. In particular, we show that such a graph consists entirely of trees, unicyclic…
Answering a question of Bona, it is shown that for n>1 the probability that 1 and 2 are in the same cycle of a product of two n-cycles on the set {1,2,...,n} is 1/2 if n is odd and 1/2 - 2/(n-1){n+2) if n is even. Another result concerns…
Motivated by classical nontransitivity paradoxes, we call an $n$-tuple $(x_1,\dots,x_n) \in[0,1]^n$ \textit{cyclic} if there exist independent random variables $U_1,\dots, U_n$ with $P(U_i=U_j)=0$ for $i\not=j$ such that…
We study cycle counts in permutations of $1,\dots,n$ drawn at random according to the Mallows distribution. Under this distribution, each permutation $\pi \in S_n$ is selected with probability proportional to $q^{\text{inv}(\pi)}$, where…
Several cycle lexicographical orders are found to describe the relative likelihood of elements of the random walks on the symmetric group generated by the conjugacy classes of transpositions, 3-cycles, and n-cycles. Spectral analysis finds…
The commuting probability of a finite group $G$ is the probability that two randomly chosen elements commute. Let $S\subseteq(0,1]$ denote the set of all possible commuting probabilities of finite groups. We prove that $S\cup\{0\}$ is…
It is well known that the proportion of pairs of elements of $\operatorname{SL}(n,q)$ which generate the group tends to $1$ as $q^n\to \infty$. This was proved by Kantor and Lubotzky using the classification of finite simple groups. We give…
If we pick two elements of a non-abelian group at random, the odds this pair commutes is at most 5/8, so there is a "gap" between abelian and non-abelian groups \cite{G}. We prove a "topological" generalization estimating the odds a word…
This paper develops an analogy between the cycle structure of, on the one hand, random permutations with cycle lengths restricted to lie in an infinite set $S$ with asymptotic density $\sigma$ and, on the other hand, permutations selected…
We consider a nonlinear random walk which, in each time step, is free to choose its own transition probability within a neighborhood (w.r.t. Wasserstein distance) of the transition probability of a fixed L\'evy process. In analogy to the…
Let $\mathbb{S}_n$ denote the symmetric group on $[n]=\{1,\ldots,n\}$ with the uniform probability measure. For a permutation $\pi \in \mathbb{S}_n$ let $X_{\pi}$ denote the simplicial complex on the vertex set $[n]$ whose simplices are all…
We study the length of cycles of random permutations drawn from the Mallows distribution. Under this distribution, the probability of a permutation $\pi \in \mathbb{S}_n$ is proportional to $q^{\textrm{inv}(\pi)}$ where $0<q\le 1$ and…
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…
We study the probability of a given element, in the commutator subgroup of a group, to be equal to a commutator of two randomly chosen group elements, and compute explicit formulas for calculating this probability for some interesting…
The commuting probability of a finite group is defined to be the probability that two randomly chosen group elements commute. Let P \subset (0,1] be the set of commuting probabilities of all finite groups. We prove that every point of P is…
Let G be a finite group. Let pi be a permutation from S{n}. We study the distribution of probabilities of equality a{1} a{2} ...a{n-1}a{n}=a{pi{1}}^{epsilon{1}} a{pi_{2}}^{epsilon{2}}...a{pi{n-1}}^{epsilon_{n-1}} a_{pi_{n}}^{epsilon{n}},…