Free Group

The free group F_S with free generating set S can be constructed as follows. S is a set of symbols and we suppose for every s in S there is a corresponding "inverse" symbol, s−1, in a set S−1. Let T = S ∪ S−1, and define a word in S to be any written product of elements of T. That is, a word in S is an element of the monoid generated by T. The empty word is the word with no symbols at all. For example, if S = {a, b, c}, then T = {a, a−1, b, b−1, c, c−1}, and

is a word in S. If an element of S lies immediately next to its inverse, the word may be simplified by omitting the s, s−1 pair:

A word that cannot be simplified further is called reduced. The free group F_S is defined to be the group of all reduced words in T. The group operation in F_S is concatenation of words (followed by reduction if necessary). The identity is the empty word. A word is called cyclically reduced, if its first and last letter are not inverse to each other. Every word is conjugate to a cyclically reduced word, and the cyclically reduced conjugates of a cyclically reduced word are all cyclic permutations. For instance b−1abcb is not cyclically reduced, but is conjugate to abc, which is cyclically reduced. The only cyclically reduced conjugates of abc are abc, bca, and cab.