A note concerning Fox’s paper on Fenchel’s conjecture

The object of this note is to point out and correct an error in the paper [21 of Fox, purporting to prove Fenchel's conjecture that a finitely generated. infinite Fuchsian group has a torsion-free normal subgroup of finite index. Fox divided the proof of the main result in his paper into four cases and an error occurs in the proofs of Cases (III) and (IV). A direct proof of Case (III) was given. While a direct proof of Case (IV) can be given, the author shows that it also follows indirectly from the result in the paper [1] of Burns and Solitar. Given any three integers a > 1, b > 1 and c > 1, there exist permutations A of order a and B of order b, such that AB has order c. Fox divided the proof of this lemma into the four cases: (I) ab 0 (mod 2) and max{a, b} ? c < a + b, (II) ab 0 (mod 2) and c : a + b, (III) a b c 1 (mod 2), (IV) a b 1 and c 0 (mod 2), and subcases. In the subcase m(a + b 2) + 2 ? c < (m + l)(b + 1) 1 of Case (III) where m is the largest integer not exceeding (c l)/(b + 1), and it is assumed that a ? b < c, the number of distinct symbols in the permutations [2, p. 64] nl~~~W B ( Wv-sI .. WI2 I7 (vWb B = (vl * *t*v W_ ***W P2) * (V W2 .. * ]Pi+]1)'