Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Torsion in Groups

Rishi Vyas

Ben Gurion

A element in a group is said to be torsion if it has finite order. In this
talk, we will describe some aspects of the set of torsion elements and
other related constructions for various families of groups. After outlining
some relevant material from the literature, we will introduce the notion of
torsion length: roughly speaking, the torsion length of a group is the
number of times one needs to `remove' torsion before arriving at a
torsion-free quotient. We will study this invariant in the context of
finitely generated and finitely presented groups.

The material in this talk will be reasonably elementary - the only real
prerequisite is some basic combinatorial group theory. This work is joint
with Dr Maurice Chiodo.