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arXiv · 2605.30840

Finitely generated Howson groups which are not strongly Howson

Abstract

A group $G$ is called a Howson group if the intersection of any two finitely generated subgroups of $G$ is again finitely generated. It is called strongly Howson if, in addition, the rank of such an intersection is bounded only in terms of the ranks of the two subgroups. Strongly Howson groups are indeed Howson. Recently, Zhang and Zhao showed that the converse fails, by constructing the first examples of infinitely generated Howson groups which are not strongly Howson. In this note, we provide finitely generated examples with and without torsion elements, thereby answering a question posed by Zhang and Zhao.

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Ke Wang, Qiang Zhang. 2026-05-29. Finitely generated Howson groups which are not strongly Howson. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30840

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