Properly discontinuous groups of affine transformations: a survey (Q5955164)

A group \(\Gamma\) of affine transformations of an affine space \(E\) is said to act properly discontinuously if for every compact subset \(K\) of \(E\) the set \(\{\gamma\in\Gamma\mid\gamma K\cap K\neq\emptyset\}\) is finite. If moreover, the quotient space \(\Gamma\backslash E\) is compact, the group \(\Gamma\) is said to be (affine) crystallographic. Concerning the algebraic structure of groups of affine transformations, two questions have been studied intensively in the mathematical literature: (1) Is every properly discontinuous group of affine transformations virtually solvable? (Milnor), (2) Is every affine crystallographic group virtually solvable? (Auslander). This paper presents a very nice state of the art survey concerning the knowledge of the answers to both questions. In fact, it is known that Milnor's question has a negative answer, while Auslander's question is still open (and is referred to as Auslander's conjecture), but is known to have a positive answer in dimensions \(\leq 6\). The paper is organized as follows. After having motivated the questions both algebraically and geometrically, the author recalls the case of classical crystallographic groups (of isometries) and shows how some of the Bieberbach theorems can be generalized to the affine case. The author then concentrates on Auslander's conjecture for which he presents a complete solution in dimenion 2 and a partial proof for the 3-dimensional case. Thereafter, he explains the counter-example to Milnor's question in dimension 3 followed by a discussion of Auslander's conjecture in higher dimensions. Finally, the author concludes with a brief overview of further results.