arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ralph Strebel.
In this article, I study some classes of finitely presented groups with the aim of finding out whether the maximal metabelian quotients of the members of these classes admit finite presentations. The considered classes include those of soluble groups, of one-relator or knot groups, and of Artin groups.
In "Subgroups of free profinite groups and large subfields of Q" (Israel J. Math. 39 (1981), no. 1-2, pages 25-45; MR 617288) A. Lubotzky and L. van den Dries raise the question whether a finitely generated, residually finite group is necessarily free if the rank function on its subgroups of finite index satisfies Schreier's well-known index rank relation (see Question 2 on p. 34). I answered this question in 1980 but, so far, I have not published my answer. This note fills the omission; it gives an amended and abridged version of my original proof.
Richard J. Thompson invented his group F in the 60s; it is a group full of surprises: it has a finite presentation with 2 generators and 2 relators, and a derived group that is simple; it admits a peculiar infinite presentation and has a local definition which implies that F is dense in the topological group of all orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the unit interval. In this monograph groups G are studied which depend on three parameters I, A, and P and which generalize the local definition of Thompson's group F thus: G consists of all orientation preserving PL-homeomorphisms of the real line with supports in the interval I, slopes in the multiplicative subgroup P of the positive reals and breaks in a finite subset of the additive P submodule A of R. A first aim of the monograph is to investigate in which form familiar properties of F continue to hold for these groups. Main aims of the monograph are the determination of isomorphisms among the groups G and the study of their automorphism groups. Complete answers are obtained if the group P is not cyclic or if the interval I is the full line.
We show that several classes of groups G of PL-homeomorphisms of the real line admit non-trivial homomorphisms from G to the additive group of reals that are fixed by every automorphism of G. The classes of groups enjoying the stated property include the generalisations of Thompson's group F studied by K. S. Brown, M. Stein, S. Cleary, and Bieri-Strebel but also the class of groups investigated by Bieri-Neumann-Strebel in [BNS87, Theorem 8.1]. It follows that every automorphism of a group in one of these classes has infinitely many associated twisted conjugacy classes.
I survey the known results about the invariant Sigma 1 of groups of PL-homeomorphisms of a compact interval and supplement them with new results about Sigma 1 of PL-homeomorphism groups of a half line or a line. The proofs are based on the Cayley-graph definition of the invariant.
We describe various classes of infinitely presented groups that are condensation points in the space of marked groups. A well-known class of such groups consists of finitely generated groups admitting an infinite minimal presentation. We introduce here a larger class of condensation groups, called infinitely independently presentable groups, and establish criteria which allow one to infer that a group is infinitely independently presentable. In addition, we construct examples of finitely generated groups with no minimal presentation, among them infinitely presented groups with Cantor-Bendixson rank 1, and we prove that every infinitely presented metabelian group is a condensation group.
We show that every finitely generated nilpotent group of class 2 occurs as the quotient of a finitely presented abelian-by-nilpotent group by its largest nilpotent normal subgroup.
Memoir on the Sigma invariants and their applications, version 2
A recipe for obtaining finitely presented abelian-by-nilpotent groups is given. It relies on a geometric procedure that generalizes the construction of finitely presented metabelian groups introduced by R. Bieri and R. Strebel in 1980.