Related papers: A combinatorial problem in infinite groups

A longstanding question of Gromov asks whether every one-ended word-hyperbolic group contains a subgroup isomorphic to the fundamental group of a closed hyperbolic surface. An infinite family of word-hyperbolic groups can be obtained by…

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…

Let $w$ be a multilinear commutator word, that is, a commutator of weight $n$ in $n$ different group variables. It is proved that if $G$ is a profinite group in which all pronilpotent subgroups generated by $w$-values are periodic, then the…

A necessary condition for uniqueness of factorizations of elements of a finite group $G$ with factors belonging to a union of some conjugacy classes of $G$ is given. This condition is sufficient if the number of factors belonging to each…

This article is an introduction to formal languages from the point of view of combinatorial group theory. Group theoretic applications are included and language classes are defined algebraically.

Let w be a group-word. Suppose that the set of all w-values in a profinite group G is contained in a union of countably many cosets of subgroups. We are concerned with the question to what extent the structure of the verbal subgroup w(G)…

The Weyl group of the Cuntz algebra O_n, with n finite, is investigated. This is (isomorphic to) the group of polynomial automorphisms of O_n, namely those induced by unitaries that can be written as finite sums of words in the canonical…

Given an infinite group $G$ and a subset $A$ of $G$ we let $\Delta(A) = {g \in G : |gA \cap A| =\infty}$ (this is sometimes called the combinatorial derivation of $A$). A subset $A$ of $G$ is called large if there exists a finite subset $F$…

By strengthening known results about primitivity-blocking words in free groups, we prove that for any nontrivial element w of a free group of finite rank, there are words that cannot be subwords of any cyclically reduced automorphic image…

Waring's classical problem deals with expressing every natural number as a sum of g(k) k-th powers. Recently there has been considerable interest in similar questions for nonabelian groups, and simple groups in particular. Here the k-th…

We study a characteristic subgroup of finitely generated groups, consisting of elements with uniform upper bound for word-lengths. For a group $G$, we denote this subgroup by $G_{bound}$. We give sufficient criteria for triviality and…

If w is a word in d>1 letters and G is a finite group, evaluation of w on a uniformly randomly chosen d-tuple in G gives a random variable with values in G, which may or may not be uniform. It is known that if G ranges over finite simple…

Let $G=F\ast_\varphi t$ be an HNN extension of a free group $F$ with two equal associated normal subgroups $H_1 = H_2$ of finite index. We prove that the word problem in $G$ is decidable in polynomial time. This result extends to the case…

Let $G$ be a group, and let $S$ be a finite subset of $G$ that generates $G$ as a monoid. The co-word problem is the collection of words in the free monoid $S^{\ast}$ that represent non-trivial elements of $G$. A current conjecture, based…

The isomorphism problem for infinite finitely presented groups is probably the hardest among standard algorithmic problems in group theory. Classes of groups where it has been completely solved are nilpotent groups, hyperbolic groups, and…

A group word $w$ is said to be strongly concise in a class $\mathcal{C}$ of profinite groups if, for every group $G$ in $\mathcal{C}$ such that $w$ takes less than $2^{\aleph_0}$ values in $G$, the verbal subgroup $w(G)$ is finite. Detomi,…

Every element $w$ in the commutator subgroup of the free group $\mathbb{F}_2$ of rank 2 determines a closed curve in the grid $\mathbb{Z} \times \mathbb{R} \cup \mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{Z} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$. The winding numbers of…

We consider space functions $s(n)$ of finitely presented groups $G =< A\mid R> .$ (These functions have a natural geometric analog.) To define $s(n)$ we start with a word $w$ over $A$ of length at most $n$ equal to 1 in $G$ and use…

In response to questions by Kassabov, Nikolov and Shalev, we show that a given subset $A$ of a finite simple group $G$ is the image of some word map $w : G\times G\to G $ if and only if (i) $A$ contains the identity and (ii) $A$ is…

A finitely generated group $G$ is called poly-context-free if its word problem $\mathrm{WP}(G)$ is an intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We consider the quaternionic lattices $\Gamma_\tau$ over the field…