Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 1997
Let G be a group, and let Fn[G] be the free G-group of rank n. Then Fn[G] is just the natural non-abelian analogue of the free ℤG-module of rank n, and correspondingly the group Φn(G) of equivariant automorphisms of Fn[G] is a natural analogue of the general linear group GLn(ℤG). The groups Φn(G) have been studied recently in [4, 8, 5]. In particular, in [5] it was shown that if G is not finitely presentable (f.p.) then neither is Φn(G), and conversely, that Φn(G) is f.p. if G is f.p. and n≠2. It is a common phenomenon that for small ranks the automorphism groups of free objects may behave unstably (see the survey article [2]), and the main aim of the present paper is to show that this turns out to be the case for the groups Φ2(G).