Representations of holomorphs of group extensions with Abelian kernels

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the construction of faithful representations of the automorphism group and the holomorph of an extension of an abelian group by some other group, the representations here being homomorphisms into certain restricted parts of the automorphism groups of smallish abelian groups. We apply these to two very specific cases, namely to finitely generated metabelian groups and to certain soluble groups of finite rank. We describe the applications first.