Sunday, 21 September 2008

gr.group theory - non-abelian groups of prescribed order

I am also unsure of what "nontriviality" conditions you want to impose. Without any further conditions, the following answers your question:



Call a positive integer n nilpotent if every group of order n is nilpotent.



Call a positive integer n abelian if every group of order n is abelian.



Suppose that the prime factorization of n is pa11cdotsparr. Then:



1) n is nilpotent iff for all i,j,k with 1leqkleqai, pkinotequiv1pmodpj.



2) n is abelian iff it is nilpotent and aileq2 for all i.



These results are proved in




Pakianathan, Jonathan(1-WI); Shankar, Krishnan(1-MI)
Nilpotent numbers.
Amer. Math. Monthly 107 (2000), no. 7, 631--634.




The proofs are constructive: for any n which is not nilpotent (resp. abelian), they give an explicit group of that order which is not nilpotent (resp. abelian).



The paper is available at



http://www.math.uga.edu/~pete/nilpotentnumbers.pdf

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