Saturday, 2 February 2008

gr.group theory - Decidability of conjugacy problem for finitely generated subgroups of free groups

The conjugacy problem for a free group Fn on n letters has an easy solution. Each element of Fn is conjugate to a unique and easily computable "cyclically reduced element" (this means that if you arrange the word around a circle, then there are no cancellations), so two elements of Fn are conjugate if and only if they have the same cyclically reduced conjugates.



I've been trying unsuccessfully to generalize this to solve the following problem. Let x1,ldots,xk and y1,ldots,yk be two finite sets of elements of Fn. Let Gx and Gy be the subgroups of Fn generated by the xi and the yi, respectively. Is there an algorithm to decide if Gx and Gy are conjugate? Does anyone know how to do this? Thank you very much!

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