Products of similar matrices Original Research Article

Given a nontrivial conjugacy class Ω of GL(V) which is contained in SL(V), we want to find a minimal integer k such that every element of SL(V) is a product of at most k elements of Ω. The analogous question is studied when Ω is replaced by Ф · Ф−1, where Ф is a nontrivial conjugacy class of GL(V).