Related papers: Higman operations on integer sequences, and embedd…
This paper is for the proceedings of the Chen-Chow Conference held in Tianjin, China in October 2000. The goal of the paper is to produce and survey evidence for a connection between Chen's work on iterated integrals on the one hand, and…
The aim of this lecture is to present the concept of C-algebra and to illustrate its applications in two contexts: the study of reflection groups and their folding on the one hand, the structure of rational conformal field theories on the…
The study of the word problems of groups dates back to Dehn in 1911, and has been a central topic of study in both group theory and computability theory. As most naturally occurring presentations of groups are recursive, their word problems…
For the Higman reversing operation $\rho$ and for a set of integer-valued functions $\mathcal X$ the following has been proved. Let the subgroup $A_{\mathcal X}$ be benign in the free group $F$, let the respective finitely presented…
This is an account of a series of lectures of Graham Higman on "januarials", namely coset graphs for actions of triangle groups which become 2-face maps when embedded in orientable surfaces.
This article is an expository account of the theory of twisted commutative algebras, which simply put, can be thought of as a theory for handling commutative algebras with large groups of linear symmetries. Examples include the coordinate…
This is an old article of 2000. Its aim is to illustrate how a Lie-theoretic result of Zelmanov enables one to treat various problems in group theory.
This expository article revolves around the question to find short presentations of finite simple groups. This subject is one of the most active research areas of group theory in recent times. We bring together several known results on…
This is an extended version of notes prepared for the talk at the conference "Rajchman-Zygmund-Marcinkiewicz 2000" based on recent works of the authors.
We give an explicit recursive presentation for Mihailova's subgroup $M(H)$ of $F_n \times F_n$ corresponding to a finite, concise and Peiffer aspherical presentation $H=< x_1,..., x_n \mid R_1,..., R_m>$. This partially answers a question…
We study the maximal subgroups (also known as group $\mathcal{H}$-classes) of finitely presented special inverse monoids. We show that the maximal subgroups which can arise in such monoids are exactly the recursively presented groups, and…
This paper gathers four lectures, based on a mini-course at IMA in 2014, whose aim was to discuss the structure of approximate subgroups of an arbitrary group, following the works of Hrushovski and of Green, Tao and the author. Along the…
This paper is a follow-up to our joint paper with I. Agol, P. Storm and K. Whyte "Finiteness of arithmetic hyperbolic reflection groups". The main purpose is to investigate the effective side of the method developed there and its possible…
These are lecture notes from a lecture series given at CIRM in the Fall 2023. They give a down-to-earth introduction to Khovanov and Seidel's categorical representation of Artin-Tits groups, emphasizing the fact that it is all explicitly…
This paper is an overview of my recent work on abstract homomorphisms of algebraic groups. It is based on a talk given at the Conference on Group Actions and Applications in Geometry, Topology, and Analysis held in Kunming in July 2012.
The main topic of these notes are Markov loops, studied in the context of continuous time Markov chains on discrete state spaces. We refer to [1] and [2] for the short "history" of the subject. In contrast with these references, symmetry is…
Group theory is a particularly fertile field for the design of practical algorithms. Algorithms have been developed across the various branches of the subject and they find wide application. Because of its relative maturity, computational…
We discuss some recent results by a number of authors regarding word maps on algebraic groups and finite simple groups, their mixing properties and the geometry of their fibers, emphasizing the role played by equidistribution results in…
I adapt a recently introduced method for integrating over the unitary group (S. Aubert and C.S. Lam, J.Math.Phys. 44, 6112-6131 (2003)) to the orthogonal group. I derive explicit formulas for a number of one, two and three-vector integrals,…
This paper is a survey on the {\em Zimmer program}. In it's broadest form, this program seeks an understanding of actions of large groups on compact manifolds. The goals of this survey are $(1)$ to put in context the original questions and…