A nonamenable finitely presented group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms (Q260109): Difference between revisions

\textit{M. M. Day} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 69, 276--291 (1950; Zbl 0039.12301)] asked whether every nonamenable group contains a nonabelian free subgroup? In 1980, A. Yu. Ol'shanskii constructed a counterexample and simultaneously S. Adyan showed that certain free Burnside groups are also counterexamples ([\textit{S. I. Adjan}, The Burnside problem and identities in groups. Translated from the Russian by John Lennox and James Wiegold. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer-Verlag (1979; Zbl 0417.20001); Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR, Ser. Mat. 46, 1139--1149 (1982; Zbl 0512.60012); Math. USSR, Izv. 21, 425--434 (1983; Zbl 0528.60011)] and [\textit{A. Yu. Ol'shanskij}, Russ. Math. Surv. 35, No. 4, 180--181 (1980; Zbl 0465.20030)]). These nonamenable groups are not finitely presented, and so the restriction of the problem to the class of finitely presented groups remained open until 2003. In that year A. Yu. Ol'shanskii and M. V. Sapir discovered the first example of a nonamenable finitely presented group which does not contain any nonabelian free group, [\textit{A. Yu. Ol'shanskii} and \textit{M. V. Sapir}, Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 96, 43--169 (2002; Zbl 1050.20019)]. After that, some other examples were constructed, but all known examples have torsion elements. In this article, the authors give a new example which is torsion-free. This group is generated by three simple homeomorphisms of \(\mathbb{R}\) and it has nine defining relations.