Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2009
The trivial observation that every automorphism of a group is determined by its restriction to a set of generators suggests the converse question: if X is a subset of a group G such that each automorphism of G is determined (or “almost” determined) by its restriction to X, to what extent is the structure of G governed by that of the subgroup which X generates? Is this subgroup in some sense necessarily “large” in G? If the index of the subgroup is used as a measure of largeness, then in the absence of additional hypotheses, the answer to the second question is generally “no”, the additive group of rationals with X = {1} being an obvious counterexample. (More confounding is the existence of uncountable torsion-free abelian groups for which inversion is the only non-trivial automorphism. See, for example, [2], [3], and [4].) However, under certain finiteness assumptions, it seems that some positive conclusions are obtainable. One such example will be considered here.