No description available.

Graduation date: 2000

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2000. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Mathematics, June 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Mathematics, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is broadly concerned with two problems: investigating the ergodic properties of boundary actions, and investigating various properties of Schreier graphs. Our main result concerning the former problem is that, in a variety of situations, the action of an invariant random subgroup of a group G on a boundary of G (e.g. the hyperbolic boundary, or the Poisson boundary) is conservative (there are no wandering sets). This addresses a question asked by Grigorchuk, Kaimanovich, and Nagnibeda and establishes a connection between invariant random subgroups and normal subgroups. We approach the latter problem from a number of directions (in particular, both in the presence and the absence of a probability measure), with an emphasis on what we term Schreier structures (edge-labelings of a given graph which turn it into a Schreier coset graph). One of our main results is that, under mild assumptions, there exists a rich space of invariant Schreier structures over a given unimodular graph structure, in that this space contains uncountably many ergodic measures, many of which we are able to describe explicitly.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Department of Mathematics, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mathematics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-114).

No description available.

We use profinite Bass-Serre theory (the theory of profinite group actions on profinite trees) to prove that the fundamental groups of finite graphs of free groups which are l-acylindrical and have finitely generated edge groups are conjugacy separable. We apply this theorem to: demonstrate that a generic positive one-relator group is conjugacy separable; produce a variant of the Rips con- struction in which the output group is conjugacy separable; apply this last to exhibit an example of a strong profinite equivalence between two finitely presented groups, one of which is conjugacy separable and the other having unsolvable conjugacy problem. We further use profinite Bass-Serre theory to demonstrate that having one end is an up-weak pro-C property for any extension- closed class C of finite groups. We show by example that it is not a down-weak pro-p property for any prime p. We consider Korenev's definition of pro-p ends for a pro-p group, and show that the number of ends of a finitely generated residually p group cannot be less than the number of pro-p ends of its pro-p completion. We explore possibilities for, but are ultimately unsuc- cessful in giving, a proper analogue of Stallings' theorem for pro-p groups. We ask which other properties might be profinite, and use another variant of the Rips construction to produce examples of patholog- ical groups such that either they are hyperbolic groups which are not residually finite, or neither property (FA) nor property (T) is an up-weak profinite property.