Faithful Representations of Finitely Generated Metabelian Groups

Abstract

In [3] Remeslennikov proves that a finitely generated metabelian group G has a faithful representation of finite degree over some field F of characteristic zero (respectively, p > 0) if its derived group G’ is torsion-free (respectively, of exponent p). By the Lie-Kolchin-Mal'cev theorem any metabelian subgroup of GL(n, F) has a subgroup of finite index whose derived group is torsion-free if char F = 0 and is a p-group of finite exponent if char F = p > 0. Moreover every finite extension of a group with a faithful representation (of finite degree) has a faithful representation over the same field. Thus Remeslennikov's results have a gap which we propose here to fill.