Palindromic width of free nilpotent groups. (Q2253044)

The notion of palindromic width of a group originates from the combinatorial group theory and has been studied by the first author during the last years. Here the authors consider finitely generated free nilpotent groups and prove that their palindromic width is finite (see Theorem 1.1). They also prove that the same is true for (free abelian)-by-nilpotent groups of finite rank (see Proposition 3.7). In particular, the palindromic width of a finitely generated free metabelian group is finite (see Corollary 3.8). Two interesting open problems remain (see Problems 1 and 2 at pages 380 and 381). The first is of algorithmic nature. The second correlates the palindromic width to the notion of commutator width, which is more usual in the commutator calculus of groups. The conjecture is that the finiteness of the palindromic width is equivalent to that of the commutator width for a finitely generated group. Counterexamples, in fact, are not known at the moment.