Economical adjunction of square roots to groups

How large must an overgroup of a given group be in order to contain a square root of any element of the initial group? We give an almost exact answer to this question (the obtained estimate is at most twice worse than the best possible) and state several related open questions.Comment: 5 pages. A Russian version of this paper is at http://mech.math.msu.su/department/algebra/staff/klyachko/papers.htm V2: minor correction

Inapproximability Results for Equations over Finite Groups

An equation over a finite group G is an expression of form w_1 w_2... w_k = 1_G, where each w_i is a variable, an inverted variable, or a constant from G; such an equation is satisfiable if there is a setting of the variables to values in G so that the equality is realized. We study the problem of simultaneously satisfying a family of equations over a finite group G and show that it is NP-hard to approximate the number of simultaneously satisfiable equations to within |G|-ε for any ε > 0. This generalizes results of Håstad (2001, J. ACM, 48 (4)), who established similar bounds under the added condition that the group G is Abelian