Burnside's Problem

Burnside's Problem

The Burnside problem, posed by William Burnside in 1902 and one of the oldest and most influential questions in group theory, asks whether a finitely generated group in which every element has finite order must necessarily be a finite group. In plain language, if by looking at individual elements of a group we suspect that the whole group is finite, must it indeed be true? The problem has many variants (see bounded and restricted below) that differ in the additional conditions imposed on the orders of the group elements.