Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
A recurrent problem over many years in the study of linear groups has been the determination of the central height of a unipotent normal subgroup of some matrix group of specified type. In the theory of matrix groups over division rings, unipotent elements frequently present special difficulties and these have usually been by-passed by the addition of some suitable hypothesis. In this paper we make a start on the removal of these extraneous hypotheses. Our motivation for doing this now conies from [9], where by 3·7 of that paper the additional assumptions have finally reduced us to degree one, a situation where unipotent elements present few problems!