Groups covered by finitely many nilpotent subgroups

Abstract

Let G be a finitely generated soluble group. Lennox and Wiegold have proved that G has a finite covering by nilpotent subgroups if and only if any infinite set of elements of G contains a pair {x, y} such that (x, y) is nilpotent. The main theorem of this paper is an improvement of the previous result: we show that G has a finite covering by nilpotent subgroups if and only if any infinite set of elements of G contains a pair {x, y} such that [x, ny] = 1 for some integer n = n(x, y) ≥ 0.