How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
Balls of a word metric are finite if and only if the generating set is finite
Statement
Balls of a word metric are finite if and only if the generating set is finite.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The hypotheses of the Statement.
The word metric of with respect to is (The word metric of a group with respect to a generating set).
The word length is the least such that is a product of elements of (Word length of a group element with respect to a generating set).
The word metric is a left-invariant metric and coincides with the path metric of the Cayley graph (The word metric is a left-invariant metric and coincides with the path metric of the Cayley graph).
In a locally finite connected graph every ball of the path metric is finite (In a connected locally finite graph every ball of the path metric is finite).
Every vertex of a Cayley graph has the same degree, and the graph is locally finite exactly when the symmetrised generating set is finite (Cayley-graph neighbourhoods are equipotent, and local finiteness is equivalent to finiteness of the symmetrised subset).
is the open ball, the closed ball and the sphere of centre and radius . The radius is always a strictly positive real; a ball of radius or of negative radius is never written in this library. (Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space).
A set is finite when for some . (The cardinality of a finite set).
A group is finitely generated when some finite subset generates it (Finitely generated groups).
Write Then is finite and , the right-hand product being the -valued one of. (The product rule: , and ).
Proof
If is finite the Cayley graph is locally finite, so balls of its path metric are finite; left invariance moves this to every centre.
If is infinite then the open ball of radius about the identity contains every element of , because each such element has word length ; so that ball is infinite.
Depends on
- In a connected locally finite graph every ball of the path metric is finite
- Finitely generated groups
- Cayley-graph neighbourhoods are equipotent, and local finiteness is equivalent to finiteness of the symmetrised subset
- Word length of a group element with respect to a generating set
- The word metric of a group with respect to a generating set
- The word metric is a left-invariant metric and coincides with the path metric of the Cayley graph
- Open ball, closed ball and sphere in a metric space
- The cardinality $\lvert A\rvert$ of a finite set
- The product rule: $\lvert A \times B\rvert = \lvert A\rvert\,\lvert B\rvert$, and $\big\lvert\prod_{i<m} A_i\big\rvert = \prod_{i<m}\lvert A_i\rvert$
Used by
- Taking ℤ itself as a generating set gives a word metric of diameter one, not bilipschitz equivalent to the standard one Counterexample
- FALSE: any two infinite finitely generated groups are quasi-isometric False statement
- A finitely generated group is finite if and only if it is quasi-isometric to a point Proposition
Dependency tree · two levels
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Sources
- C. Loh, Geometric Group Theory: An Introduction (2015 course version), 264 pp. (standard reference, not scraped)
- C. Drutu and M. Kapovich, Geometric Group Theory (with an appendix by B. Nica), 837 pp. (standard reference, not scraped)