Abstract (eng)
The topic of this thesis is cofinitary groups, which are special subgroups of the infinite permutation group. We will begin by giving an overview of the algebraic properties of cofinitary groups. We will survey the algebraic properties of cofinitary groups, where the main results give us bounds on the size of cofinitary groups based on their orbit structure. We will then examine how to construct cofinitary groups using inverse limits and automorphisms of Boolean algebras. We then begin looking at maximal cofinitary groups and their possible sizes as well as the combinatorial characteristic a_g. In chapter 4 we will use forcing to show that there are infinitely many, non-isomorphic, maximal cofinitary groups, by constructing a group with n infinite and m finite orbits, for any tuple (n, m) in N>0 x N. In chapter 5, we use forcing constructions to show the existence of a maximal cofinitary group into which every countable group embeds. Finally, we show that we can tightly control the possible sizes of cofinitary groups in a model by adapting a novel proof from the theory of maximal almost disjoint families.