On problems related to growth, entropy, and spectrum in group theory (Q1972735)

The article under review is an extensive survey paper covering various aspects of growth properties of groups. Besides a summary of the most important results, the authors present a wealth of open problems and tantalising conjectures that hopefully will spur more research activity in this interesting field. A list of nearly 200 references provides access to original work and background. Let us give a short summary of the topics covered in the article. The first two sections, on uniformly exponential growth and growth tightness, discuss aspects related to the (exponential) growth rate of a group together with a finite generating set. The next two sections, on regularity of growth functions and classical growth series, consider the classical notion of word length growth. The second of these two focuses on the question when such a growth series is rational or not. The following two sections, on growth series with weights and complete growth series, deal with different generalisations of the classical growth series. Finally, the last section, on spectral radius of simple random walks on Cayley graphs, relates this spectral radius to the growth rate discussed at the beginning and gives estimates for it in the case of surface groups.