Factorizable infinite solvable groups (Q1122655)

This paper deals with the structure of soluble groups G which are factorized by finitely many conjugates of a certain subgroup A. In particular, the authors prove that a metanilpotent group G, having a factorization \(G=A^{x_ 1}A^{x_ 2}...A^{x_ n}\), where A is a finitely generated abelian subgroup and \(x_ 1,x_ 2,...,x_ n\) are elements of G, is finite-by-abelian. An example shows that a similar result does not hold for soluble groups of derived length 3. Also, it is shown that an infinite soluble group of the form \(G=<g><g>^ c<g>\); where g and c are elements of G, is either central-by-finite or a split extension \(S_ 3\ltimes ({\mathbb{Z}}\times {\mathbb{Z}})\), where the symmetric group \(S_ 3\) acts faithfully on \({\mathbb{Z}}\times {\mathbb{Z}}\). A recent deep number theoretic result of \textit{A. J. van der Poorten} [Sémin. Théorie Nombres, Paris 1982/83, Prog. Math. 51, 259-266 (1984; Zbl 0562.10015)] is used in the proofs.