Ulam asked whether all Lie groups can be represented faithfully on a countable set. We establish a reduction of Ulam's problem to the case of simple Lie groups. In particular, we solve the problem for all solvable Lie groups and more generally Lie groups w ...
This dissertation investigates the amenability of topological full groups using a property of group actions called extensive amenability. Extensive amenability is a core concept of several amenability results for groups of dynamical origin. We study its pr ...
The objective of this series is to study metric geometric properties of disjoint unions of Cayley graphs of amenable groups by group properties of the Cayley accumulation points in the space of marked groups. In this Part II, we prove that a disjoint union ...
Extensive amenability is a property of group actions which has recently been used as a tool to prove amenability of groups. We study this property and prove that it is preserved under a very general construction of semidirect products. As an application, w ...
We investigate how probability tools can be useful to study representations of non-amenable groups. A suitable notion of "probabilistic subgroup" is proposed for locally compact groups, and is valuable to induction of representations. Nonamenable groups ad ...
The Tarski number of a nonamenable group is the smallest number of pieces needed for a paradoxical decomposition of the group. Nonamenable groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms were introduced in [N. Monod, Groups of piecewise projective homeomorph ...
We propose elementary and explicit presentations of groups that have no amenable quotients and yet are SQ-universal. Examples include groups with a finite K (pi,1), no Kazhdan subgroups and no Haagerup quotients. ...
Consider the following property of a topological group G: every continuous affine G-action on a Hilbert space with a bounded orbit has a fixed point. We prove that this property characterizes amenability for locally compact a-compact groups (e.g., countabl ...
Non-positively curved spaces admitting a cocompact isometric action of an amenable group are investigated. A classification is established under the assumption that there is no global fixed point at infinity under the full isometry group. The visual bounda ...
We give a complete characterization of the locally compact groups that are nonelementary Gromov-hyperbolic and amenable. They coincide with the class of mapping tori of discrete or continuous one-parameter groups of compacting automorphisms. We moreover gi ...
Motivated by the Benjamini-Schramm non-unicity of percolation conjecture we study the following question. For a given finitely generated nonamenable group Gamma, does there exist a generating set S such that the Cayley graph (Gamma, S), without loops and m ...
Let G be any group containing an infinite elementary amenable subgroup and let 2 < p < infinity. We construct an exhaustion of l(p) G by closed invariant subspaces which all intersect trivially a fixed non-trivial closed invariant subspace. This is an obst ...
We present the general notion of Borel fields of metric spaces and show some properties of such fields. Then we make the study specific to the Borel fields of proper CAT(0) spaces and we show that the standard tools we need behave in a Borel way. We also i ...
We introduce a relative fixed point property for subgroups of a locally compact group, which we call relative amenability. It is a priori weaker than amenability. We establish equivalent conditions, related among others to a problem studied by Reiter in 19 ...
We prove that amenability of a discrete group is equivalent to dimension flatness of certain ring inclusions naturally associated with measure preserving actions of the group. This provides a group-measure space theoretic solution to a conjecture of Luck s ...
Consider a proper cocompact CAT(0) space X. We give a complete algebraic characterisation of amenable groups of isometries of X. For amenable discrete subgroups, an even narrower description is derived, implying Q-linearity in the torsion-free case. We est ...
Supramenability of groups is characterised in terms of invariant measures on locally compact spaces. This opens the door to constructing interesting crossed product C*-algebras for non-supramenable groups. In particular, stable Kirchberg algebras in the UC ...
We provide the first examples of finitely generated simple groups that are amenable (and infinite). This follows from a general existence result on invariant states for piecewise-translations of the integers. The states are obtained by constructing a suita ...
Grigorchuk and Medynets recently announced that the topological full group of a minimal Cantor Z-action is amenable. They asked whether the statement holds for all minimal Cantor actions of general amenable groups as well. We answer in the negative by prod ...
The group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of the line provides straightforward torsion-free counterexamples to the so-called von Neumann conjecture. The examples are so simple that many additional properties can be established. ...