Justin Moore (Cornell)

Ordinal arithmetic and subgroups of Thompson's group

The class of finitely generated groups embeddable into Richard Thompson's group $F$ is both restrictive and rich at the same time. We show that there is a family of groups within this class which is pre-well-ordered in type $\epsilon_0$ by the embeddability relation. Moreover, the operations of addition and multiplication on the ordinals translate into natural group-theoretic operations—direct sum and a type of permutational wreath product. This talk will give a description of this correspondence. This is joint work with Collin Bleak and Matt Brin.