A presentation is given for the cohomology ring of a finitely presented combinatorially aspherical group with trivial coefficients in an integral domain. Cohomological periodicity is characterized in terms of the cup product.

We compute the kernel of cup product of 1-dimensional cohomology classes for a group G acting trivially on Z or F2, by means of the naturality of cup product and the 5-term exact sequence of low degree of a suitable LHS spectral sequence. We determine thereby when cup product is injective, and when it is null.

This is an investigation of whether a group epimorphism maps the maximal perfect subgroup of its domain onto that of its image. It is shown how the question arises naturally from considerations of algebraic K-theory and Quillen's plus-construction. Some sufficient conditions are obtained; these relate to the upper central series, or alternatively the derived series, of the domain. By means of topological/homological techniques, the results are then sharpened to provide, in certain circumstances, conditions which are necessary as well as sufficient.

We show that the classical interpretation of H3(G, A) is equivalent to Taylor's solutions of compound extensions of groups. It is also equivalent to the exactness to an eight term sequence. Only halves of the equivalences are fully shown in the paper but the other halves are clear.

In this paper we continue our investigation of the topological filtration on the complex representation ring R(G) of a finite group, see [4] and [5]. To recall the basic definitions from (1): let

map a k-dimensional representation ζ to the (flat) vector bundle over the classifying space BG associated to the universal G-bundle by the G-structure on Ck. Then, if denotes the (2k − l)-skeleton of BG,