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24 - Coset graphs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

R.C. Lyndon
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, U.S.A.
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Summary

1. This is a report on a series of joint papers with Joel Brenner [BL 1-6]. Our work was prompted by a 1933 paper of Bernhard Neumann [Nl] arising, I am told, from a problem in the foundations of geometry, or, more immediately, by Carol Tretkoff's 1975 sequel [Tl] to Neumann's paper.

Neumann was led to study maximal nonparabolic subgroups of the modular group. The modular group M has a presentation

M = (a,b : a2 = b3 = 1).

It is well known to be isomorphic to the group PSL(2,Z) and to have a representation on the extended complex plane ℂ* given by

The element c = ab : z + z + 1 is parabolic in the sense of having only a single fixed point in ℂ*, and it is easily shown that the parabolic elements of M are exactly the conjugates of nontrivial powers of c.

A subgroup P of M is a parabolic group if all its nontrivial elements are parabolic, and a subgroup S is nonparabolic if it contains no parabolic element. The maximal parabolic sugroups are exactly the conjugates of the infinite oyclic group C generated by c. Neumann observed that if P is a maximal parabolic subgroup and if S is a complement to P in the sense that S ∩ P = 1 and SP = M, then S is a maximal nonparabolic subgroup.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1987

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