Related papers: Failure of separation by quasi-homomorphisms in ma…

We give elementary applications of quasi-homomorphisms to growth problems in groups. A particular case concerns the number of torsion elements required to factorise a given element in the mapping class group of a surface.

We construct infinitely many linearly independent quasi-homomorphisms on the mapping class group of a Riemann surface with genus at least two which vanish on a handlebody subgroup. As a corollary, we disprove a conjecture of Reznikov on…

We refine the construction of quasi-homomorphisms on mapping class groups. It is useful to know that there are unbounded quasi-homomorphisms which are bounded when restricted to particular subgroups since then one deduces that the mapping…

It is a classical result of Powell that pure mapping class groups of connected, orientable surfaces of finite type and genus at least three are perfect. In stark contrast, we construct nontrivial homomorphisms from infinite-genus mapping…

We show that the mapping class group of a closed oriented surface of genus at least three is generated by 3 elements of order 3 and by 4 elements of order 4. Note that the mapping class group cannot be generated by finitely many torsion…

There exist right angled Artin groups $A$ such that the isomorphism problem for finitely presented subgroups of $A$ is unsolvable, and for certain finitely presented subgroups the conjugacy and membership problems are unsolvable. It follows…

Suppose that $X$ and $Y$ are surfaces of finite topological type, where $X$ has genus $g\geq 6$ and $Y$ has genus at most $2g-1$; in addition, suppose that $Y$ is not closed if it has genus $2g-1$. Our main result asserts that every…

Let $G$ be a closed highly homogeneous subgroup of $S_{\infty}$ not involving circular orderings. We show that the closure of a conjugacy class from $G$ contains a conjugacy class which is comeagre in it. Furthermore, we show that the…

This paper concerns rigidity of the mapping class groups. We show that any homomorphism $\phi:{\rm Mod}_g\to {\rm Mod}_h$ between mapping class groups of closed orientable surfaces with distinct genera $g>h$ is trivial if $g\geq 3$ and has…

We show that the pure mapping class group is uniformly perfect for a certain class of infinite type surfaces with noncompact boundary components. We then combine this result with recent work in the remaining cases to give a complete…

We prove that the first integral cohomology of pure mapping class groups of infinite type genus one surfaces is trivial. For genus zero surfaces we prove that not every homomorphism to $\mathbb{Z}$ factors through a sphere with finitely…

We show the existence of elements of infinite order in some homotopy groups of the contactomorphism group of overtwisted spheres. It follows in particular that the contactomorphism group of some high dimensional overtwisted spheres is not…

We show that the identity component of the group of diffeomorphisms of a closed oriented surface of positive genus admits many unbounded quasi-morphisms. As a corollary, we also deduce that this group is not uniformly perfect and its…

We prove the congruence subgroup property for the centralizer of a finite subgroup $G$ in the mapping class group of a hyperbolic oriented and connected surface of finite topological type $S$ such that the genus of the quotient surface…

We prove that, for any infinite-type surface $S$, the integral homology of the closure of the compactly-supported mapping class group $\overline{\mathrm{PMap}_c(S)}$ and of the Torelli group $\mathcal{T}(S)$ is uncountable in every positive…

Given an oriented surface of positive genus with finitely many punctures, we classify the finite orbits of the mapping class group action on the moduli space of semisimple complex special linear two dimensional representations of the…

We offer a criterion for showing that the automorphism group of an ultrahomogeneous structure is topologically 2-generated and even has a cyclically dense conjugacy class. We then show how finite topological rank of the automorphism group…

We consider linear groups which do not contain unipotent elements of infinite order, which includes all linear groups in positive characteristic, and show that this class of groups has good properties which resemble those held by groups of…

We prove a result that relates the number of homomorphisms from the fundamental group of a compact nonorientable surface to a finite group $G$, where conjugacy classes of the boundary components of the surface must map to prescribed…

We classify the groups quasi-isometric to a group generated by finite-order elements within the class of one-ended hyperbolic groups which are not Fuchsian and whose JSJ decomposition over two-ended subgroups does not contain rigid vertex…