On a notion of closeness of groups

Abstract

Enlightened by the notion of perturbation of $C^{\ast }$-algebras, we introduce, and study briefly in this article, a notion of closeness of groups. We show that if two groups are “close enough” to each other, and one of them has the property that the orders of its elements have a uniform finite upper bound, then these two groups are isomorphic (but in general they are not). We also study groups that are close to abelian groups, as well as an equivalence relation induced by closeness.