Non-cancellation and Mislin genus of certain groups and \(H_0\)-spaces (Q1602677)

This paper is focused on the non-cancellation set of groups of a certain kind (the non-cancellation set of \(G\) measures the extent to which the infinite cyclic group cannot be cancelled as a direct factor of \(G\times \mathbb Z\)). The authors use a notion related to Nielsen equivalence classes of presentations of a finite abelian group (see any book of combinatorial group theory for this) to give an alternative description of a group structure on the non-cancellation set of groups of a certain kind (in the third section of the paper). In the last section, non-cancellation of the circle is considered as a direct factor of a topological space, and in particular it is proved that the Mislin genera of certain \(H_{0}\)-spaces with two non-vanishing homotopy groups can be identified with the genera of certain nilpotent groups.