The motif problem

Fix a choice and ordering of four pairwise non-adjacent vertices of a parallelepiped, and call a motif a sequence of four points in R^3 that coincide with these vertices for some, possibly degenerate, parallelepiped whose edges are parallel to the axes. We show that a set of r points can contain at most r^2 motifs. Generalizing the notion of motif to a sequence of L points in R^p, we show that the maximum number of motifs that can occur in a point set of a given size is related to a linear programming problem arising from hypergraph theory, and discuss some related questions.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figur

Variants of theorems of Baer and Hall on finite-by-hypercentral groups

We show that if a group $G$ has a finite normal subgroup $L$ such that $G/L$ is hypercentral, then the index of the hypercenter of $G$ is bounded by a function of the order of $L$. This completes recent results generalizing classical theorems by R. Baer and P. Hall. Then we apply our results to groups of automorphisms of a group $G$ acting in a restricted way on an ascending normal series of $G$