Related papers: Conciseness of first-order formulae

A regular set of words is ($k$-)locally testable if membership of a word in the set is determined by the nature of its subwords of some bounded length $k$. In this article we study groups for which the set of all geodesic words with respect…

We prove that if $G$ is a free-torsion group and $w(t)$ is a word in the alphabet $G \sqcup \{t^{\pm 1}\}$ with exponent sum one, then the group $<G,t|(w(t))^k = 1>$, where $k \geq 2$, is relatively hyperbolic with respect to $G$.

Every torsion--free abelian group of finite rank has two essentially unique complete direct decompositions whose summands come from specific classes of groups.

We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…

Let $k$ be a field and let $G$ be an affine algebraic group over $k$. Call a $G$-torsor weakly versal for a class of $k$-schemes $\cal C$ if it specializes to every $G$-torsor over a scheme in $\cal C$. A recent result of the first author,…

Let A be an alphabet and W be a set of words in the free monoid A*. Let S(W) denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of A* consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in W. We call a set of words W finitely based if the monoid…

In 1968, John Thompson proved that a finite group G is solvable if and only if every 2-generator subgroup of G is solvable. In this paper, we prove that solvability of a finite group G is guaranteed by a seemingly weaker condition: G is…

In many instances in first order logic or computable algebra, classical theorems show that many problems are undecidable for general structures, but become decidable if some rigidity is imposed on the structure. For example, the set of…

We generalize the classical definition of effectively closed subshift to finitely generated groups. We study classical stability properties of this class and then extend this notion by allowing the usage of an oracle to the word problem of…

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…

A matching in a group G is a bijection f from a subset A to a subset B in G such that af(a) does not belong to A for all a in A. The group G is said to have the matching property if, for any finite subsets A,B in G of same cardinality with…

We show that every definable group G in an o-minimal structure is definably finitely generated. That is, G contains a finite subset that is not included in any proper definable subgroup. This provides another proof, and a generalization to…

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 identify the simple algebraic groups over number fields that are, in a suitable sense, determined by their finite adele points. Assuming CSP and Grothendieck rigidity, our results essentially characterize higher rank arithmetic groups…

Let G be a finite quasisimple group of Lie type. We show that there are regular semisimple elements x,y in G, x of prime order, and |y| is divisible by at most two primes, such that the product of the conjugacy classes of x and y contain…

The primary purpose of this article is to show that a certain natural set of axioms yields a completeness result for continuous first-order logic. In particular, we show that in continuous first-order logic a set of formulae is (completely)…

We construct words with small image in a given finite alternating or unimodular group. This shows that word width in these groups is unbounded in general.

A group element is called generalized torsion if a finite product of its conjugates is equal to the identity. We show that in a finitely generated abelian-by-finite group, an element is generalized torsion if and only if its image in the…

The point of this note is to prove that a language is in the complexity class PP if and only if the strings of the language encode valid inferences in a Bayesian network defined using function-free first-order logic with equality.

If V is a finitely generated variety such that the first-order theory of the finite members of V is decidable, we show that V is residually finite, and in fact has a finite bound on the sizes of subdirectly irreducible algebras. This result…