Related papers: Orbit-blocking words in free groups
We present obstruction results for self-similar groups regarding the generation of free groups. As a main consequence of our main results, we solve an open problem posed by Grigorchuk by showing that in an automaton group where a…
We study the language-theoretic aspects of the word problem, in the sense of Duncan & Gilman, of free products of semigroups and monoids. First, we provide algebraic tools for studying classes of languages known as super-AFLs, which…
We study groups of reversible cellular automata, or CA groups, on groups. More generally, we consider automorphism groups of subshifts of finite type on groups. It is known that word problems of CA groups on virtually nilpotent groups are…
We prove that, for a finitely generated group hyperbolic relative to virtually abelian subgroups, the generalised word problem for a parabolic subgroup is the language of a real-time Turing machine. Then, for a hyperbolic group, we show…
We establish new characterizations of primitive elements and free factors in free groups, which are based on the distributions they induce on finite groups. For every finite group $G$, a word $w$ in the free group on $k$ generators induces…
We give lower bounds on the complexity of the word problem of certain non-solvable groups: for a large class of non-solvable infinite groups, including in particular free groups, Grigorchuk's group and Thompson's groups, we prove that their…
We give new and improved results on the freeness of subgroups of free profinite groups: A subgroup containing the normal closure of a finite word in the elements of a basis is free; Every infinite index subgroup of a finitely generated…
The word problem for discrete groups is well-known to be undecidable by a Turing Machine; more precisely, it is reducible both to and from and thus equivalent to the discrete Halting Problem. The present work introduces and studies a real…
A monoid is called special if it admits a presentation in which all defining relations are of the form $w = 1$. Every group is special, but not every monoid is special. In this article, we describe the language-theoretic properties of the…
Gromov asked whether every one-ended word-hyperbolic group contains a hyperbolic surface group. We prove that every one-ended double of a free group has a hyperbolic surface subgroup if (1) the free group has rank two, or (2) every…
Motivated by the question of which completely regular semigroups have context-free word problem, we show that for certain classes of languages $\mathfrak{C}$(including context-free), every completely regular semigroup that is a union of…
To any free group automorphism, we associate a real pretree with several nice properties. First, it has a rigid/non-nesting action of the free group with trivial arc stabilizers. Secondly, there is an expanding pretree-automorphism of the…
We find polynomial-time solutions to the word problem for free-by-cyclic groups, the word problem for automorphism groups of free groups, and the membership problem for the handlebody subgroup of the mapping class group. All of these…
We prove that the word problem for the infinite cyclic group is not EDT0L, and obtain as a corollary that a finitely generated group with EDT0L word problem must be torsion. In addition, we show that the property of having an EDT0L word…
Given a (finite or infinite) subset $X$ of the free monoid $A^*$ over a finite alphabet $A$, the rank of $X$ is the minimal cardinality of a set $F$ such that $X \subseteq F^*$. A submonoid $M$ generated by $k$ elements of $A^*$ is…
Let $\mathfrak A$ be an alphabet and $W$ be a set of words in the free monoid ${\mathfrak A}^*$. Let $S(W)$ denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of ${\mathfrak A}^*$ consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in $W$. A set of…
We provide the first examples of words in the free group of rank 2 which are not proper powers and for which the corresponding word maps are non-surjective on an infinite family of finite non-abelian simple groups.
The word problem is an old and central problem in (computational) group theory. It is well-known that the word problem is undecidable in general, but decidable for specific types of presentations. Consistent polycyclic presentations are an…
For a finite Coxeter group W, a subword complex is a simplicial complex associated with a pair (Q, \rho), where Q is a word in the alphabet of simple reflections, \rho is a group element. We describe the transformations of such a complex…
We introduce the task of out-of-order membership to a formal language L, where the letters of a word w are revealed one by one in an adversarial order. The length |w| is known in advance, but the content of w is streamed as pairs (i, w[i]),…