The orders of products and commutators in prime-power groups

Abstract

It is known † that, if G is any p -group (group whose order is a power of the prime p ) the class of which is less than p , then the order of a product of elements of G cannot exceed the orders of all the factors. This result in general ceases to hold when the class of G exceeds p − 1. In the present paper, we prove the following general results.