Products of involutions in the stable general linear group

Abstract

In the stable general linear group over an arbitrary field, we prove that every element with determinant $\pm 1$ is the product of three involutions, and of no less in general. We also obtain several results of the same flavor, with applications to decompositions of automorphisms of an infinite-dimensional vector space that are scalar multiples of finite-rank perturbations of the identity.

63 pages