Listing Words in Free Groups

Lists of equivalence classes of words under rotation or rotation plus reversal (i.e., necklaces and bracelets) have many uses, and efficient algorithms for generating these lists exist. In combinatorial group theory elements of a group are typically written as words in the generators and their inverses, and necklaces and bracelets correspond to conjugacy classes and relators respectively. We present algorithms to generate lists of freely and cyclically reduced necklaces and bracelets in free groups. Experimental evidence suggests that these algorithms are CAT -- that is, they run in constant amortized time

Walks on Free Groups and other Stories -- twelve years later

We start by studying the distribution of (cyclically reduced) elements of the free groups Fn with respect to their abelianization (or equivalently, their integer homology class. We derive an explicit generating function, and a limiting distribution, by means of certain results (of independent interest) on Chebyshev polynomials; we also prove that the reductions modulo an arbitrary prime of these classes are asymptotically equidistributed, and we study the deviation from equidistribution. We extend our techniques to a more general setting and use them to study the statistical properties of long cycles (and paths) on regular (directed and undirected) graphs. We return to the free group to study some growth functions of the number of conjugacy classes as a function of their cyclically reduced length.Comment: 45pp, appeared in the Schupp volume of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, published version of arXiv:math/991107