On Ulam widths of finitely presented infinite simple groups

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hyde, James, Lodha, Yash
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911392323338240
author Hyde, James
Lodha, Yash
author_facet Hyde, James
Lodha, Yash
contents A fundamental notion in group theory, which originates in an article of Ulam and von Neumann from $1947$ is uniform simplicity. A group $G$ is said to be $n$-uniformly simple for $n \in \mathbf{N}$ if for every $f,g\in G\setminus \{id\}$, there is a product of no more than $n$ conjugates of $g$ and $g^{-1}$ that equals $f$. Then $G$ is uniformly simple if it is $n$-uniformly simple for some $n \in \mathbf{N}$, and we refer to the smallest such $n$ as the Ulam width, denoted as $\mathcal{R}(G)$. If $G$ is simple but not uniformly simple, one declares $\mathcal{R}(G)=\infty$. In this article, we construct for each $n\in \mathbf{N}$, a finitely presented infinite simple group $G$ such that $n<\mathcal{R}(G)<\infty$. These are the first such examples among the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. For the class of finitely generated (but not finitely presentable) infinite simple groups, the existence of such examples was settled in the work of Muranov. However, this had remained open for the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. Our examples are also of type $F_{\infty}$, which means that they are fundamental groups of aspherical CW complexes with finitely many cells in each dimension. Uniformly simple groups are in particular uniformly perfect: there is an $n\in \mathbf{N}$ such that every element of the group can be expressed as a product of at most $n$ commutators of elements in the group. We also show that the analogous notion of width for uniform perfection is unbounded for our family of finitely presented infinite simple groups. To our knowledge, this is also the first such family.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Ulam widths of finitely presented infinite simple groups
Hyde, James
Lodha, Yash
Group Theory
A fundamental notion in group theory, which originates in an article of Ulam and von Neumann from $1947$ is uniform simplicity. A group $G$ is said to be $n$-uniformly simple for $n \in \mathbf{N}$ if for every $f,g\in G\setminus \{id\}$, there is a product of no more than $n$ conjugates of $g$ and $g^{-1}$ that equals $f$. Then $G$ is uniformly simple if it is $n$-uniformly simple for some $n \in \mathbf{N}$, and we refer to the smallest such $n$ as the Ulam width, denoted as $\mathcal{R}(G)$. If $G$ is simple but not uniformly simple, one declares $\mathcal{R}(G)=\infty$. In this article, we construct for each $n\in \mathbf{N}$, a finitely presented infinite simple group $G$ such that $n<\mathcal{R}(G)<\infty$. These are the first such examples among the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. For the class of finitely generated (but not finitely presentable) infinite simple groups, the existence of such examples was settled in the work of Muranov. However, this had remained open for the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. Our examples are also of type $F_{\infty}$, which means that they are fundamental groups of aspherical CW complexes with finitely many cells in each dimension. Uniformly simple groups are in particular uniformly perfect: there is an $n\in \mathbf{N}$ such that every element of the group can be expressed as a product of at most $n$ commutators of elements in the group. We also show that the analogous notion of width for uniform perfection is unbounded for our family of finitely presented infinite simple groups. To our knowledge, this is also the first such family.
title On Ulam widths of finitely presented infinite simple groups
topic Group Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07512