The purpose of this paper is to prove a result about the power and commutator structure of groups which generalises some results of Philip Hall. The results presented here are the key to determining the class of a nilpotent wreath product.

Let G be a group with a normal subgroup H whose index is a power of a prime p, and which is nilpotent with exponent a power of p. Gilbert Baumslag (Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 55 (1959), 224–231) has shown that such a group is nilpotent; the main result of this paper is an upper bound on its nilpotency class in terms of parameters of H and G/H. It is shown that this bound is attained whenever G is a wreath product and H its base group.

A descending central series, here called the cpp-series, is involved in these calculations more closely than is the lower central series, and the class of the wreath product in terms of this series is also found.

Two tools used to obtain the main result, namely a useful basis for a finite p-group and a result about the augmentation ideal of the integer group ring of a finite p-group, may have some independent interest. The main result is applied to the construction of some two-generator groups of large nilpotency class with exponents 8, 9, and 25.

Oscillation results are obtained for a first order functional differential equation, by transforming it to an equation for which oscillatory information exists in the literature already.

We present in this note a useful extension of the criteria given in a recent paper [Advances in Appl. Probability 8 (1976), 737–771] for the finiteness of hitting times and mean hitting times of a Markov chain on sets in its (general) state space. We illustrate our results by giving conditions for the finiteness of the mean number of customers in the busy period of a queue in which both the service-times and the arrival process may depend on the waiting time in the queue. Such conditions also suffice for the embedded waiting time chain to have a unique stationary distribution.

Let Λ be a complete R-order in the semi-simple K-algebra A. Then it has been shown that for each indecomposable Λ-lattice M which is not projective, there exists a unique almost split sequence 0 → N → E → M → 0. Here we study the middle term E and characterize those almost split sequences where E has a projective direct summand. In the case where Λ is the group-ring RG for a finite group G, we get information about the almost split sequences for the syzygies and apply our results in an example.

Let X be a finite set of cardinality n, and let F be a family of k-subsets of X. In this paper we prove the following conjecture of P. Erdös and V.T. Sós.

If n > n0(k), k ≥ 4, then we can find two members F and G in F such that |F ∩ G| = 1.

It is shown that a near-ring is a ring if it is generated by a group of automorphisms of its additive group that contains all inner automorphisms.