The finiteness of the Reidemeister number of morphisms between almost-crystallographic groups. (Q644438)

Given two groups \(H\) and \(K\) and two homomorphisms \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) from \(H\) to \(K\), an equivalence relation on \(K\) it is automatically defined saying that two elements \(u,v\in K\) are equivalent if and only if they are conjugated by the images of an element \(h\in H\) via \(u=\varphi(h)v\psi(h)^{-1}\). The corresponding equivalence classes are called Reidemeister classes and the coincidence Reidemeister classes are those for which the values of \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) are the same. The Reidemeister coincidence number \(R(\varphi,\psi)\) of \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) is defined as the cardinality of the set of coincidence Reidemeister classes. The role of \(R(\varphi,\psi)\) is important for the classification of almost-crystallographic groups, thanks to some classic results of Bieberbach on the structure of these groups. The authors provide two interesting criteria of finiteness of \(R(\varphi,\psi)\) in Theorems 3.6, 3.9 and 3.11 for connected, simply connected, nilpotent Lie groups. On the other hand, a closed connected manifold \(X\) has the \(R_\infty\) property if its Reidemeister coincidence number is infinite for every homeomorphism of \(X\) onto itself. This invariant plays an important role for a conjecture of \textit{A. Fel'shtyn} and \textit{R. Hill} [in K-Theory 8, No. 4, 367-393 (1994; Zbl 0814.58033)]. Theorems 4.1, 4.2, 4.4 provide criteria to decide whether an almost-crystallographic group has the \(R_\infty\) property or not (note that the 2 and 3 dimensional cases are approached with the help of a computational approach). Finally, Theorems 5.1 and 5.2 show some conditions for which the Reidemeister coincidence number is equal to the more known Nielsen coincidence number.