Generating groups of certain soluble varieties

Abstract

Any variety of groups is generated by its free group of countably infinite rank. A problem that appears in various forms in Hanna Neumann's book [7] (see, for intance, sections 2.4, 2.5, 3.5, 3.6) is that of determining if a given variety B can be generated by Fk(B), one of its free groups of finite rank; and if so, if Fn(B) is residually a k-generator group for all n ≧ k. (Here, as in the sequel, all unexplained notation follows [7].)