Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the course of investigating the structure of finite groups which have a representation in the form ABA, for suitable subgroups A and B, we have been forced to study groups G which admit an automorphism ϕ such that every element of G lies in at least one of the orbits under ϕ of the elements g, gϕr(g), gϕrϕ(g)ϕ2r(g), gϕr(g)ϕr2r(g)ϕ3r(g), etc., where g is a fixed element of G and r is a fixed integer.
In a previous paper on ABA-groups written jointly with I. N. Herstein (4), we have treated the special case r = 0 (in which case every element of G can be expressed in the form ϕi(gj)), and have shown that if the orders of ϕ and g are relatively prime, then G is either Abelian or the direct product of an Abelian group of odd order and the quaternion group of order 8.