Existence of a Hopfian finitely presented group with undecidable weak Whitehead problem

A Hopfian finitely presented group is a finitely presented group for which every surjective endomorphism is an automorphism; its word problem asks whether a given word represents the identity, and its weak Whitehead problem asks whether two finite tuples are related by an automorphism. Existence conjecture. There exists a Hopfian finitely presented group with decidable word problem (so a computable group) but undecidable weak Whitehead problem. The conjecture would separate decidability of the word problem from decidability of the weak Whitehead problem for Hopfian finitely presented groups. Combined with the paper's characterization, such a group would provide a computable finitely presented structure without a computable dd-Σ2\Sigma_2 Scott sentence.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Gianluca Paolini, “Computable Scott sentences and the weak Whitehead problem for finitely presented groups”, arXiv:2401.00079 (2024).

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.