Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Professor Sarah Rees
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
The notable exclusions from the family of automatic groups are those nilpotent groups which are not virtually abelian, and the fundamental groups of compact 3-manifolds based on the Nil or Sol geometries. Of these, the 3-manifold groups have been shown by Bridson and Gilman to lie in a family of groups defined by conditions slightly more general than those of the automatic groups, i.e. to have combings which lie in the formal language class of indexed languages. In fact, the combings constructed by Bridson and Gilman for these groups can also be seen to be real-time languages (i.e. recognized by real-time Turing machines). This article investigates the situation for nilpotent and polycyclic groups. It is shown that a finitely generated class 2 nilpotent group with cyclic commutator subgroup is real-time combable, as are all 2 or 3-generated class 2 nilpotent groups, and groups in specific families of nilpotent groups (the finitely generated Heisenberg groups, groups of unipotent matrices over Z and the free class 2 nilpotent groups). Further, it is shown that any polycyclic-by-finite group embeds in a real-time combable group. All the combings constructed in the article are boundedly asynchronous, and those for nilpotent-by-finite groups have polynomially bounded length functions, of a degree equal to the nilpotency class, c; this verifies a polynomial upper bound on the Dehn functions of those groups of degree c+1.
Author(s): Rees S; Gilman RH; Holt DF
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Algebra and Computation
Year: 1999
Volume: 9
Issue: 2
Pages: 135-155
Print publication date: 01/01/1999
ISSN (print): 0218-1967
ISSN (electronic): 1793-6500
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S0218196799000102
DOI: 10.1142/S0218196799000102
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
