Complete positive group presentations

Abstract

A combinatorial property of prositive group presentations, called completeness, is introduced, with an effective criterion for recognizing complete presentations, and an iterative method for completing an incomplete presentation. We show how to directly read several properties of the associated monoid and group from a complete presentation: cancellativity or existence of common multiples in the case of the monoid, or isoperimetric inequality in the case of the group. In particular, we obtain a new criterion for recognizing that a monoid embeds in a group of fractions. Typical presentations eligible for the current approach are the standard presentations of the Artin groups and the Heisenberg group.