Excluding four exceptional cases, we determine the asphericity of the relative presentation for m ⩾ 2. If H = ⟨g, h⟩ ⩽ G, then the exceptional cases occur when H is isomorphic to C5 or C6.

We introduce and study Hankel operators defined on the Hardy space of regular functions of a quaternionic variable. Theorems analogous to those of Nehari and Fefferman are proved.

The splitting number of a link is the minimal number of crossing changes between different components required, on any diagram, to convert it to a split link. We introduce new techniques to compute the splitting number, involving covering links and Alexander invariants. As an application, we completely determine the splitting numbers of links with nine or fewer crossings. Also, with these techniques, we either reprove or improve upon the lower bounds for splitting numbers of links computed by Batson and Seed using Khovanov homology.

A self-adjoint first-order system with Hermitian π-periodic potential Q(z), integrable on compact sets, is considered. It is shown that all zeros of are double zeros if and only if this self-adjoint system is unitarily equivalent to one in which Q(z) is π/2-periodic. Furthermore, the zeros of are all double zeros if and only if the associated self-adjoint system is unitarily equivalent to one in which Q(z) = σ2Q(z)σ2. Here, Δ denotes the discriminant of the system and σ0, σ2 are Pauli matrices. Finally, it is shown that all instability intervals vanish if and only if Q = rσ0 + qσ2, for some real-valued π-periodic functions r and q integrable on compact sets.

We consider the boundary-value problem

where H: [0,+∞) → ℝ and f : [0, 1] × ℝ → ℝ are continuous and λ > 0 is a parameter. We show that if H satisfies a boundedness condition on a specified compact set, then this, together with an assumption that H is either affine or superlinear at +∞, implies existence of at least one positive solution to the problem, even in the case where we impose no growth conditions on f. Finally, since it can hold that f(t, y) < 0 for all (t, y) ∈ [0, 1]×ℝ, the semipositone problem is included as a special case of the existence result.

A ring R has right property (A) whenever a finitely generated two-sided ideal of R consisting entirely of left zero-divisors has a non-zero right annihilator. As the main result of this paper we give answers to two questions related to property (A), raised by Hong et al. One of the questions has a positive answer and we obtain it as a simple conclusion of the fact that if R is a right duo ring and M is a u.p.-monoid (unique product monoid), then R is right M-McCoy and the monoid ring R[M] has right property (A). The second question has a negative answer and we demonstrate this by constructing a suitable example.

We study the question of which Henselian fields admit definable Henselian valuations (with or without parameters). We show that every field that admits a Henselian valuation with non-divisible value group admits a parameter-definable (non-trivial) Henselian valuation. In equicharacteristic 0, we give a complete characterization of Henselian fields admitting a parameter-definable (non-trivial) Henselian valuation. We also obtain partial characterization results of fields admitting -definable (non-trivial) Henselian valuations. We then draw some Galois-theoretic conclusions from our results.

Cloneable sets of states in C*-algebras are characterized in terms of strong orthogonality of states. Moreover, the relation between strong cloning and distinguishability of states is investigated together with some additional properties of strong cloning in abelian C*-algebras.

It is well known that the standard Lipschitz space in Euclidean space, with exponent α ∈ (0, 1), can be characterized by means of the inequality , where is the Poisson integral of the function f. There are two cases: one can either assume that the functions in the space are bounded, or one can not make such an assumption. In the setting of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck semigroup in ℝn, Gatto and Urbina defined a Lipschitz space by means of a similar inequality for the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck Poisson integral, considering bounded functions. In a preceding paper, the authors characterized that space by means of a Lipschitz-type continuity condition. The present paper defines a Lipschitz space in the same setting in a similar way, but now without the boundedness condition. Our main result says that this space can also be described by a continuity condition. The functions in this space turn out to have at most logarithmic growth at infinity.

Let be a Noetherian local ring and let M be a finitely generated R-module of dimension d. Let be a system of parameters of M and let be a d-tuple of positive integers. In this paper we study the length of generalized fractions M(1/(x1, … , xd, 1)), which was introduced by Sharp and Hamieh. First, we study the growth of the function

Then we give an explicit calculation for the function in the case in which M admits a certain Macaulay extension. Most previous results on this topic are improved in a clearly understandable way.

Our first aim in this paper is to deal with the maximum principle for subfunctions in an arbitrary unbounded domain. As an application, we next give a result concerning the classical Phragmén–Lindelöf theorem for subfunctions in a cone. For a subfunction defined in a cone that is dominated on the boundary by a certain function, we finally generalize the Phragmén–Lindelöf type theorem by making a generalized harmonic majorant of it.

We prove that an integral Jacobson radical ring is always nil, which extends a well-known result from algebras over fields to rings. As a consequence we show that if every element x of a ring R is a zero of some polynomial px with integer coefficients, such that px(1) = 1, then R is a nil ring. With these results we are able to give new characterizations of the upper nilradical of a ring and a new class of rings that satisfy the Köthe conjecture: namely, the integral rings.

Through appropriate choices of elements in the underlying iterated function system, the methodology of fractal interpolation enables us to associate a family of continuous self-referential functions with a prescribed real-valued continuous function on a real compact interval. This procedure elicits what is referred to as an α-fractal operator on , the space of all real-valued continuous functions defined on a compact interval I. With an eye towards connecting fractal functions with other branches of mathematics, in this paper we continue to investigate the fractal operator in more general spaces such as the space of all bounded functions and the Lebesgue space , and in some standard spaces of smooth functions such as the space of k-times continuously differentiable functions, Hölder spaces and Sobolev spaces . Using properties of the α-fractal operator, the existence of Schauder bases consisting of self-referential functions for these function spaces is established.

In this paper, in terms of the hyperbolic metric, we give a condition under which the image of a hyperbolic domain of an analytic function contains a round annulus centred at the origin. From this, we establish results on the multiply connected wandering domains of a meromorphic function that contain large round annuli centred at the origin. We thereby successfully extend the results of transcendental meromorphic functions with finitely many poles to those with infinitely many poles.