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The palindromic width of a free product of groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2009

Valery Bardakov
Affiliation:
Institute of Mathematics, Siberian Branch Russian Academy of Science, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: bardakov@math.nsc.ru
Vladimir Tolstykh
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Yeditepe University, 34755 Istanbul, Turkey, e-mail: vtolstykh@yeditepe.edu.tr
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Abstract

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Palindromes are those reduced words of free products of groups that coincide with their reverse words. We prove that a free product of groups G has infinite palindromic width, provided that G is not the free product of two cyclic groups of order two (Theorem 2.4). This means that there is no uniform bound k such that every element of G is a product of at most k palindromes. Earlier, the similar fact was established for non-abelian free groups. The proof of Theorem 2.4 makes use of the ideas by Rhemtulla developed for the study of the widths of verbal subgroups of free products.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Australian Mathematical Society 2006

References

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