Words and Almost Nilpotent Varieties of Groups #

For a word of a free group of rank n , the author obtains an invariant called its standard exponent, and shows that if any residually finite group satisfying the law defined by such a word is almost nilpotent, then the standard exponent of the word equals 1 .

Conversely, if the standard exponent of a word ω is 1 , then any residually finite or soluble group and any locally finite or soluble group satisfying the group law ω≡ 1 is nilpotent-of-bounded-class-by-bounded-exponent.