The Fitting Length of a Finite Soluble Group and the Number of Conjugacy Classes of its Maximal Metanilpotent Subgroups

Abstract

It is known that the Fitting length h(G) of a finite soluble group G is bounded in terms of the number v(G) of the conjugacy classes of its maximal nilpotent subgroups. For |G| odd, a bound on h(G) in terms of v(G) was discussed in Lausch and Makan [6]. In the case when the prime 2 divides |G|, a logarithmic bound on h(G) in terms of v(G) is obtained in [7]. The main purpose of this paper is to show that the Fitting length of a finite soluble group is also bounded in terms of the number of conjugacy classes of its maximal metanilpotent subgroups. In fact, our result is rather more general.