We discuss Bass's conjecture on the vanishing of the Hattori-Stallings rank from the viewpoint of geometric group theory. It is noted that groups without u-elements satisfy this conjecture. This leads in particular to a simple proof of the conjecture in the case of groups of subexponential growth.
In this paper, we study the structure of group rings by means of endomorphism rings of their modules. The main tools used here, are the subrings fixed by automorphisms and the converse of Schur's lemma. Some results are obtained on fixed subrings and on primary decomposition of group rings.
For a group and a positive real number , define to be the number of integers less than which are dimensions of irreducible complex representations of . We study the asymptotics of for algebraic groups, arithmetic groups and finitely generated linear groups. In particular we prove an “alternative” for finitely generated linear groups in characteristic zero, showing that either there exists such that for all large , or is virtually abelian (in which case is bounded).