Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 22nd of February 2006, 3:00-3:50

Groups and Dynamics Seminar


Nilpotent groups are round

Daniel Berend of Ben Gurion University


We define a notion of roundness for finite groups. Roughly speaking, a group is round if one can order its elements in a cycle in such a way that some natural summation operators map this cycle into new cycles containing all the elements of the group. Our main result is that this combinatorial property is equivalent to nilpotence.