Cycle Action on Treelike Structures

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the action on cycles of several known classes of oligomorphic groups, that is, infinite permutation groups of countable degree having only finitely many orbits on k-sets for each k. The groups studied here are all related to trees and treelike relational structures. The sequence whose k-th term is the number of orbits in the action on k-cycles is called Parker sequence. It turns out that, if we are dealing with the automorphism group of a suitable relational structure, this sequence counts also the finite substructures admitting a cyclic automorphism; in calculating these sequences for various groups, we shall thus describe and enumerate such substructures. Di più dirò: ch'a gli alberi dà vita spirito uman che sente e che ragiona. Per prova sollo; io n'ho la voce udita che nel cor flebilmente anco mi suona. [I shall say more: the trees are given life by a human spirit that perceives and reasons. I know it by experience: I heard their voice and it still resounds faintly in my heart.] Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XIII, 49