Aspects Of Infinite Groups

This book is a festschrift in honor of Professor Anthony Gaglione''s sixtieth birthday. This volume presents an excellent mix of research and expository articles on various aspects of infinite group theory. The papers give a broad overview of present research in infinite group theory in general, and combinatorial group theory and non-Abelian group-based cryptography in particular. They also pinpoint the interactions between combinatorial group theory and mathematical logic, especially model theory.

In recent times, group theory has found wider applications in various fields of algebra and mathematics in general. But in order to apply this or that result, you need to know about it, and such results are often diffuse and difficult to locate, necessitating that readers construct an extended search through multiple monographs, articles, and papers. Such readers must wade through the morass of concepts and auxiliary statements that are needed to understand the desired results, while it is initially unclear which of them are really needed and which ones can be dispensed with. A further difficulty that one may encounter might be concerned with the form or language in which a given result is presented. For example, if someone knows the basics of group theory, but does not know the theory of representations, and a group theoretical result is formulated in the language of representation theory, then that person is faced with the problem of translating this result into the language with which they are familiar, etc. Infinite Groups: A Roadmap to Some Classical Areas seeks to overcome this challenge. The book covers a broad swath of the theory of infinite groups, without giving proofs, but with all the concepts and auxiliary results necessary for understanding such results. In other words, this book is an extended directory, or a guide, to some of the more established areas of infinite groups. Features An excellent resource for a subject formerly lacking an accessible and in-depth reference Suitable for graduate students, PhD students, and researchers working in group theory Introduces the reader to the most important methods, ideas, approaches, and constructions in infinite group theory.

This book offers a panorama of recent advances in the theory of infinite groups. It contains survey papers contributed by leading specialists in group theory and other areas of mathematics. Topics include amenable groups, Kaehler groups, automorphism groups of rooted trees, rigidity, C*-algebras, random walks on groups, pro-p groups, Burnside groups, parafree groups, and Fuchsian groups. The accent is put on strong connections between group theory and other areas of mathematics.

Wholeheartedly recommended to every student and user of mathematics, this is an extremely original and highly informative essay on algebra and its place in modern mathematics and science. From the fields studied in every university maths course, through Lie groups to cohomology and category theory, the author shows how the origins of each concept can be related to attempts to model phenomena in physics or in other branches of mathematics. Required reading for mathematicians, from beginners to experts.

The central concept in this monograph is that of a soluble group - a group which is built up from abelian groups by repeatedly forming group extensions. It covers all the major areas, including finitely generated soluble groups, soluble groups of finite rank, modules over group rings, algorithmic problems, applications of cohomology, and finitely presented groups, whilst remaining fairly strictly within the boundaries of soluble group theory. An up-to-date survey of the area aimed at research students and academic algebraists and group theorists, it is a compendium of information that will be especially useful as a reference work for researchers in the field.

By a linear group we mean essentially a group of invertible matrices with entries in some commutative field. A phenomenon of the last twenty years or so has been the increasing use of properties of infinite linear groups in the theory of (abstract) groups, although the story of infinite linear groups as such goes back to the early years of this century with the work of Burnside and Schur particularly. Infinite linear groups arise in group theory in a number of contexts. One of the most common is via the automorphism groups of certain types of abelian groups, such as free abelian groups of finite rank, torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank and divisible abelian p-groups of finite rank. Following pioneering work of Mal'cev many authors have studied soluble groups satisfying various rank restrictions and their automor phism groups in this way, and properties of infinite linear groups now play the central role in the theory of these groups. It has recently been realized that the automorphism groups of certain finitely generated soluble (in particular finitely generated metabelian) groups contain significant factors isomorphic to groups of automorphisms of finitely generated modules over certain commutative Noetherian rings. The results of our Chapter 13, which studies such groups of automorphisms, can be used to give much information here.

The development of algebraic geometry over groups, geometric group theory and group-based cryptography, has led to there being a tremendous recent interest in infinite group theory. This volume presents a good collection of papers detailing areas of current interest. Contents: Groups with the Weak Minimal Condition on Non-Permutable Subgroups (Laxmi K Chatuat and Martyn R Dixon)A Survey: Shamir Threshold Scheme and Its Enhancements (Chi Sing Chum, Benjamin Fine, and Xiaowen Zhang)The Zappa-Szep Product of Left-Orderable Groups (Fabienne Chouraqui)Totally Disconnected Groups From Baumslag-Solitar Groups (Murray Elder and George Willis)Elementary and Universal Theories of Nonabelian Commutative Transitive and CSA Groups (B Fine, A M Gaglione, and D Spellman)Commutative Transitivity and the CSA Property (Benjamin Fine, Anthony Gaglione, Gerhard Rosenberger, and Dennis Spellman)The Universal Theory of Free Burnside Groups of Large Prime Exponent (Anthony M Gaglione, Seymour Lipschutz, and Dennis Spellman)Primitive Curve Lengths on Pairs of Pants (Jane Gilman)Drawing Inferences Under Maximum Entropy From Relational Probabilistic Knowledge Using Group Theory (Gabriele Kern-Isberner, Marco Wilhelm, and Christoph Beierle)On Some Infinite-Dimensional Linear Groups and the Structure of Related Modules (L A Kurdachenko and I Ya Subbotin)On New Analogs of Some Classical Group Theoretical Results in Lie Rings (L A Kurdachenko, A A Pypka and I Ya Subbotin)Log-Space Complexity of the Conjugacy Problem in Wreath Products (Alexei Myasnikov, Svetla Vassileva, and Armin Weiss)Group Presentations, Cayley Graphs and Markov Processes (Peter Olszewski) Readership: Graduate students and researchers in group theory. Keywords: Infinite Group Theory;Combinatorial Group Theory;Geometric Group TheoryReview: Key Features: This book is centered on infinite group theory from a combinatorial and geometric point of view. It also contains material on non-commutative algebraic group-based cryptography

The book, based on a course of lectures by the authors at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, covers aspects of infinite permutation groups theory and some related model-theoretic constructions. There is basic background in both group theory and the necessary model theory, and the following topics are covered: transitivity and primitivity; symmetric groups and general linear groups; wreatch products; automorphism groups of various treelike objects; model-theoretic constructions for building structures with rich automorphism groups, the structure and classification of infinite primitive Jordan groups (surveyed); applications and open problems. With many examples and exercises, the book is intended primarily for a beginning graduate student in group theory.