THE NUMBER OF CYCLIC SUBGROUPS OF FINITE ABELIAN GROUPS AND MENON’S IDENTITY

We give a new formula for the number of cyclic subgroups of a finite abelian group. This is based on Burnside’s lemma applied to the action of the power automorphism group. The resulting formula generalises Menon’s identity.

Minimum topological genus of compact bordered Klein surfaces admitting a prime-power automorphism

In the nineteenth century, Hurwitz [8] and Wiman [14] obtained bounds for the order of the automorphism group and the order of each automorphism of an orientable and unbordered compact Klein surface (i. e., a compact Riemann surface) of topological genus g s 2. The corresponding results of bordered surfaces are due to May, [11], [12]. These may be considered as particular cases of the general problem of finding the minimum topological genus of a surface for which a given finite group G is a group of automorphisms. This problem was solved for cyclic and abelian G by Harvey [7] and Maclachlan [10], respectively, in the case of Riemann surfaces and by Bujalance [2], Hall [6] and Gromadzki [5] in the case of non-orientable and unbordered Klein surfaces. In dealing with bordered Klein surfaces, the algebraic genus—i. e., the topological genus of the canonical double covering, (see Alling-Greenleaf [1])—was minimized by Bujalance- Etayo-Gamboa-Martens [3] in the case where G is cyclic and by McCullough [13] in the abelian case.

Groups with an automorphism squaring many elements

A universal power automorphism (Cooper [1]) of a group is an automorphism mapping every element x to a power xn for some fixed integer n. It is long known that a group admitting such an automorphism with n= −1, 2 or 3 must be Abelian. Miller [5] showed that for every other non-zero integral value of n there exist non-Abelian groups admitting a non-trivial universal power automorphism x→xn.