An element of a free group F is called almost primitive in F, if it is primitive in every proper subgroup containing it, though not in F itself. Several examples of almost primitive elements (APEs) are exhibited. The main results concern the behaviour of proper powers wℓ of certain APEs w in a free group F (and, more generally, in free products of cycles) with respect to any subgroup H containing such a power “minimally“: these assert, in essence, that either such powers of w behave in H as do powers of primitives of F, or, if not, then they “almost” do so and furthermore H must then have finite index in F precisely determined by the smallest positive powers of conjugates of w lying in H. Finally, these results are applied to show that the groups of a certain class (potentially larger than that of finitely generated Fuchsian groups) have the property that all their subgroups of infinité index are free products of cyclic groups.

We show that if is a holomorphic function in the Dirichlet space of the unit disk, then almost all of its randomizations are multipliers of that space. This parallels a known result for lacunary power series, which also has a version for smoothness classes: every lacunary Dirichlet series lies in the Lipschitz class Lip1/2 of functions obeying a Lipschitz condition with exponent 1/2. However, unlike the lacunary situation, no corresponding “almost sure” Lipschitz result is possible for random series: we exhibit a Dirichlet function with norandomization in Lip1/2. We complement this result with a “best possible” sufficient condition for randomizations to belong almost surely to Lip1/2. Versions of our results hold for weighted Dirichlet spaces, and much of our work is carried out in this more general setting.

We establish exact randomized moduli of continuity for ℓ2-norm squared independent Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes.

Let be a finite set of finite tournaments. We will give a necessary and sufficient condition for the -free homogeneous directed graph to be divisible. That is, that there is a partition of into two classes such that neither of them contains an isomorphic copy of .

Motivated by the problem of giving a functorial (or at least uniform) description of the projective representations for wreath products Gʅ Snin terms of those for G, we study a certain binary operation on the class of “cyclic covering groups with parities”. Along with setting up the basic machinery associated to representations graded by (Ζ/2)ℓ , the main result is a description of the irreducibles for in terms of a (tensorlike) product of those for Aand for B.Finally we describe a programme for producing a PSH-algebra theory in this context, analogous to that of Zelevinsky for the case ℓ=0, and that of the author with with Michael Bean (structure) and with John Humphreys (applications) for the case ℓ=1

Two examples of topological embeddings of S2 in S4 are constructed. The first has the unusual property that the fundamental group of the complement is isomorphic to the integers while the second homotopy group of the complement is nontrivial. The second example is a non-locally flat embedding whose complement exhibits this property locally.

Two theorems are proved. The first answers the question of just when good π1 implies the vanishing of the higher homotopy groups for knot complements in S4. The second theorem characterizes local flatness for 2-spheres in S4 in terms of a local π1 condition.

Let U be a finite dimensional vector space over an infinite field F. Let U(r) denote the r–th symmetric product space over U. Let T: U(r) → U(s) be a linear transformation which sends nonzero decomposable elements to nonzero decomposable elements. Let dim U ≥ s + 1. Then we obtain the structure of T for the following cases: (I) F is algebraically closed, (II) F is the real field, and (III) T is injective.

Birelative K2-groups are computed for the fiber squares needed to study K2 and K3 of ℤG when G is a group of square-free order.

We answer a 1975 question of G R Gordh by showing that if X is a homogeneous compactum which is the continuous image of a compact ordered space then at least one of the following holds

(I) X is metrizable, (II) dim X = 0 or (III) X is a union of finitely many pairwise disjoint generalized simple closed curves.

We begin to examine the structure of homogeneous 0-dimensional spaces which are continuous images of ordered compacta.

An identity of L. Carlitz for a bibasic hypergeometric series is used to find some summation formulas for series in which the bases are either q and q2 or q and q3,0 < q < 1 In general, these series are neither balanced nor very-well-poised in the usual sense

A generalization of the definition of combinatorial species is given by considering functors whose domains are categories of finite sets, with various classes of relations as moronisms. Two cases in particular correspond to species for which one has notions of restriction and quotient of structures. Coalgebras and/or Hopf algebras can be associated to such species, the duals of which provide an algebraic framework for studying invariants of structures.

For a measure preserving system (X, ℬ, μ, T) with a factor (Y, C, v, T) and an infinite sequence {tn}, one can define conditional sequence entropy. We present two theorems which characterize rigid and mildly mixing extensions by conditional sequence entropy. Properties of IP-systems are used to prove our main theorems.