Solvable groups of finite Morley rank (Q1121869)

This paper is an important contribution toward Cherlin's conjecture. This conjecture states that a simple group of finite Morley rank is an algebraic group over an algebraically closed field. In fact, there are many results proving that the groups of finite Morley rank look very much like algebraic groups over an algebraically closed field, and the paper under review is devoted to the proof of one of them. It is easily seen that the commutator subgroup of a connected solvable algebraic group is nilpotent (simply because such a group is isomorphic to a subgroup of upper-triangular matrices). The author generalises this result to any group of finite Morley rank. Of course, techniques from both group theory and model theory are used, but the main step is to interpret an algebraically closed field. This is done by using a theorem of Zilber, which allows to do such a thing in the case of a solvable, non-nilpotent connected group of finite Morley rank.