It is known that, in the unit disc as well as in the whole complex plane, the growth of the analytic coefficients $A_0,\dotsc ,A_{k-2}$ of

$$ \begin{align*} f^{(k)} + A_{k-2} f^{(k-2)} + \dotsb + A_1 f'+ A_0 f = 0, \quad k\geqslant 2, \end{align*} $$

$D(0,R)$

$0<R\leqslant \infty $

For every $k \geq 2$ and $n \geq 2$, we construct n pairwise homotopically inequivalent simply connected, closed $4k$-dimensional manifolds, all of which are stably diffeomorphic to one another. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic intersection form and is stably parallelisable. In dimension four, we exhibit an analogous phenomenon for spin$^{c}$ structures on $S^2 \times S^2$. For $m\geq 1$, we also provide similar $(4m-1)$-connected $8m$-dimensional examples, where the number of homotopy types in a stable diffeomorphism class is related to the order of the image of the stable J-homomorphism $\pi _{4m-1}(SO) \to \pi ^s_{4m-1}$.

A group is boundedly acyclic if its bounded cohomology with trivial real coefficients vanishes in all positive degrees. Amenable groups are boundedly acyclic, while the first nonamenable examples are the group of compactly supported homeomorphisms of $ {\mathbb {R}}^{n}$ (Matsumoto–Morita) and mitotic groups (Löh). We prove that binate (alias pseudo-mitotic) groups are boundedly acyclic, which provides a unifying approach to the aforementioned results. Moreover, we show that binate groups are universally boundedly acyclic. We obtain several new examples of boundedly acyclic groups as well as computations of the bounded cohomology of certain groups acting on the circle. In particular, we discuss how these results suggest that the bounded cohomology of the Thompson groups F, T, and V is as simple as possible.

We extend the Burger–Mozes theory of closed, nondiscrete, locally quasiprimitive automorphism groups of locally finite, connected graphs to the semiprimitive case, and develop a generalization of Burger–Mozes universal groups acting on the regular tree $T_{d}$ of degree $d\in \mathbb {N}_{\ge 3}$. Three applications are given. First, we characterize the automorphism types that the quasicentre of a nondiscrete subgroup of $\operatorname {\mathrm {Aut}}(T_{d})$ may feature in terms of the group’s local action. In doing so, we explicitly construct closed, nondiscrete, compactly generated subgroups of $\operatorname {\mathrm {Aut}}(T_{d})$ with nontrivial quasicentre, and see that the Burger–Mozes theory does not extend further to the transitive case. We then characterize the $(P_{k})$-closures of locally transitive subgroups of $\operatorname {\mathrm {Aut}}(T_{d})$ containing an involutive inversion, and thereby partially answer two questions by Banks et al. [‘Simple groups of automorphisms of trees determined by their actions on finite subtrees’, J. Group Theory 18(2) (2015), 235–261]. Finally, we offer a new view on the Weiss conjecture.