The following question came up in the class I'm teaching right now. There definitely exist groups $G$ with subgroups $H$ such that there exists some $g in G$ such that $g H g^{-1}$ is a proper subgroup of $H$. For instance, let $G$ be the (big) permutation group of $mathbb{Z}$ (by the big permutation group, I mean that elements of $G$ can move infinitely many elements of $mathbb{Z}$). Let $H subset G$ be the big permutation group of $mathbb{N}$ and let $g in G$ be the permutation that takes $n in mathbb{Z}$ to $n+1 in mathbb{Z}$. Then $g H g^{-1}$ is a proper subgroup of $H$.
The same sort of trick produces many examples like this. However, a feature of all of them is that $G$ is "big" in some way -- for instance, $G$ is not finitely presentable. By Higman's embedding theorem, you can embed such a $G$ into a finitely presentable group, so there exist examples where $G$ is finitely presentable. However, in all the examples I can come up with, the subgroup $H$ is not finitely presentable. I'm pretty sure that there exist examples in which $H$ is finitely presentable. Does anyone know of one? Even better, are there examples in which both $G$ and $H$ are of finite type (ie have compact $K(pi,1)$'s)?
No comments:
Post a Comment