Generalized Residual Finiteness of Groups

Abstract

A countable group is residually finite if every nontrivial element can act nontrivially on a finite set. When a group fails to be residually finite, we might want to measure how drastically it fails - it could be that only finitely many conjugacy classes of elements fail to act nontrivially on a finite set, or it could be that the group has no nontrivial actions on finite sets whatsoever. We define a hierarchy of properties, and construct groups which become arbitrarily complicated in this sense.