Essays in Group Theory contains five papers on topics of current interest which were presented in a seminar at MSRI, Berkeley in June, 1985. Special mention should be given to Gromov`s paper, one of the most significant in the field in the last decade. It develops the theory of hyperbolic groups to include a version of small cancellation theory sufficiently powerful to recover deep results of Ol'shanskii and Rips. Each of the remaining papers, by Baumslag and Shalen, Gersten, Shalen, and Stallings contains gems. For example, the reader will delight in Stallings' explicit construction of free actions of orientable surface groups on R-trees. Gersten's paper lays the foundations for a theory of equations over groups and contains a very quick solution to conjugacy problem for a class of hyperbolic groups. Shalen's article reviews the rapidly expanding theory of group actions on R-trees and the Baumslag-Shalen article uses modular representation theory to establish properties of presentations whose relators are pth-powers.

he authors introduce and study the notions of hyperbolically embedded and very rotating families of subgroups. The former notion can be thought of as a generalization of the peripheral structure of a relatively hyperbolic group, while the latter one provides a natural framework for developing a geometric version of small cancellation theory. Examples of such families naturally occur in groups acting on hyperbolic spaces including hyperbolic and relatively hyperbolic groups, mapping class groups, , and the Cremona group. Other examples can be found among groups acting geometrically on spaces, fundamental groups of graphs of groups, etc. The authors obtain a number of general results about rotating families and hyperbolically embedded subgroups; although their technique applies to a wide class of groups, it is capable of producing new results even for well-studied particular classes. For instance, the authors solve two open problems about mapping class groups, and obtain some results which are new even for relatively hyperbolic groups.

In this the authors obtain an isoperimetric characterization of relatively hyperbolicity of a groups with respect to a collection of subgroups. This allows them to apply classical combinatorial methods related to van Kampen diagrams to obtain relative analogues of some well-known algebraic and geometric properties of ordinary hyperbolic groups. There is also an introduction and study of the notion of a relatively quasi-convex subgroup of a relatively hyperbolic group and solve somenatural algorithmic problems.

This Festschrift is published in honor of Yuri Gurevich’s 80th birthday. An associated conference, YuriFest 2020, was planned for May 18–20 in Fontainebleau, France, in combination with the 39th Journées sur les Arithmétiques Faibles also celebrating Yuri’s 80th birthday. Because of the coronavirus situation, the conference had to be postponed, but this Festschrift is being published as originally planned. It addresses a very wide variety of topics, but by no means all of the fields of logic and computation in which Yuri has made important progress.

Wise describes a stream of geometric group theory connecting many of the classically considered groups arising in combinatorial group theory with right-angled Artin groups. He writes for new or seasoned researchers who have completed at least an introductory course of geometric groups theory or even just hyperbolic groups, but says some comfort with graphs of groups would be helpful. His topics include non-positively curved cube complexes, virtual specialness of malnormal amalgams, finiteness properties of the dual cube complex, walls in cubical small-cancellation theory, and hyperbolicity and quasiconvexity detection. Color drawings illustrate. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The theory of hyperbolic groups has its starting point in a fundamental paper by M. Gromov, published in 1987. These are finitely generated groups that share important properties with negatively curved Riemannian manifolds. This monograph is intended to be an introduction to part of Gromov's theory, giving basic definitions, some of the most important examples, various properties of hyperbolic groups, and an application to the construction of infinite torsion groups. The main theme is the relevance of geometric ideas to the understanding of finitely generated groups. In addition to chapters written by the editors, contributions by W. Ballmann, A. Haefliger, E. Salem, R. Strebel, and M. Troyanov are also included. The book will be particularly useful to researchers in combinatorial group theory, Riemannian geometry, and theoretical physics, as well as post-graduate students interested in these fields.

The study of the mapping class group Mod(S) is a classical topic that is experiencing a renaissance. It lies at the juncture of geometry, topology, and group theory. This book explains as many important theorems, examples, and techniques as possible, quickly and directly, while at the same time giving full details and keeping the text nearly self-contained. The book is suitable for graduate students. A Primer on Mapping Class Groups begins by explaining the main group-theoretical properties of Mod(S), from finite generation by Dehn twists and low-dimensional homology to the Dehn-Nielsen-Baer theorem. Along the way, central objects and tools are introduced, such as the Birman exact sequence, the complex of curves, the braid group, the symplectic representation, and the Torelli group. The book then introduces Teichmüller space and its geometry, and uses the action of Mod(S) on it to prove the Nielsen-Thurston classification of surface homeomorphisms. Topics include the topology of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, the connection with surface bundles, pseudo-Anosov theory, and Thurston's approach to the classification.