Roundness properties of groups.

DOI10.1007/S10711-005-9019-YMaRDI QIDQ2494092zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Stratos Prassidis, Jean-François Lafont

Publication date 16 June 2006

Published in Geometriae Dedicata (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0412219

zbMATH Keywords

Cayley graphsfinitely generated groupsgeodesic metric spacesroundnesstorsion groups

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Generators, relations, and presentations of groups (20F05) Geometric group theory (20F65) Geometry and structure of normed linear spaces (46B20) Global geometric and topological methods (à la Gromov); differential geometric analysis on metric spaces (53C23) Topological methods in group theory (57M07)

Abstract: Roundness of metric spaces was introduced by Per Enflo as a tool to study uniform structures of linear topological spaces. The present paper investigates geometric and topological properties detected by the roundness of general metric spaces. In particular, we show that geodesic spaces of roundness 2 are contractible, and that a compact Riemannian manifold with roundness $>1$ must be simply connected. We then focus our investigation on Cayley graphs of finitely generated groups. One of our main results is that every Cayley graph of a free abelian group on $geq2$ generators has roundness $=1$. We show that if a group has no Cayley graph of roundness $=1$, then it must be a torsion group with every element of order $2,3,5$, or 7.

Review text

Let \((X,d)\) be a metric space, \(p\in[1,\infty]\). The roundness of \((X,d)\) is \(p\) if \(p\) is the supremum of all \(q\) such that: for any four points \(x,y,z,t\) in \(X\), \(d(x,t)^q+d(y,z)^q\leq d(x,y)^q+d(x,z)^q+d(t,y)^q+d(t,z)^q\). The generalized roundness of \((X,d)\) is the supremum of all \(q\) such that: for every \(n\geq 2\) and any collection of \(2n\) points \(\{a_i\}^n_{i=1}\), \(\{b_i\}^n_{i=1}\), we have that \[ \sum_{1\leq i< j\leq n}(d(a_i,a_j)^q+ d(b_i,b_j)^q)\leq\sum_{1\leq i< j\leq n}d(a_i,b_j)^q. \] For example, the triangle inequality implies that any metric space has roundness at least 1. In this interesting paper, the authors prove the following results: 1. Every CAT(0)-space has roundness 2, 2. Proper geodesic spaces that have roundness 2 are contractible, 3. A nonsimply connected, compact, Riemannian manifold has roundness 1. Moreover, in the paper are made calculations for the Cayley graphs of finitely generated groups. The roundness spectrum of a group is defined as the collection of the roundnesses of all the Cayley graphs of the group (for different sets of generators). In this context the authors prove: 1. The roundness spectrum of a finitely generated free Abelian group on more than one generator is \(\{1\}\), 2. If the roundness spectrum of the group \(G\) does not contain 1, then \(G\) is a purely torsion group in which every element has order 2, 3, 5 or 7. In the last part of the paper are given some applications to Kazhdan groups and the Baum-Connes conjecture.

Recommendations

• Roundness properties of graphs
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Cited in

(17)

• Nilpotent groups are round.
• Characterization of Aleksandrov spaces of curvature bounded above by means of the metric Cauchy-Schwarz inequality
• On a question of Gromov about the Wirtinger inequalities
• \(K\)-Euler's inequality in Aleksandrov's \(\mathrm{CAT}(K)\) space
• Nonpositive curvature is not coarsely universal
• Quasilinearization and curvature of Aleksandrov spaces
• Roundness properties of ultrametric spaces
• Comparing the generalised roundness of metric spaces
• Supremal \(p\)-negative type of vertex transitive graphs
• Metric trees of generalized roundness one
• The maximal generalised roundness of finite metric spaces
• Old and new challenges in Hadamard spaces
• Polygonal equalities and p-negative type
• Roundness properties of Banach spaces
• Enhanced negative type for finite metric trees
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• Roundness properties of graphs

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