Natural example of finitely generated group with $\mathbb{Q}$ as a subgroup.

abstract-algebraexamples-counterexamplesfinitely-generatedgroup-theoryrational numbers

I know from an answer to this that every countable group embeds into a finitely generated group, but I'm curious if there is a nice explicit example that demonstrates this is possible with the rationals. I was able to exhibit the dyadic rationals as a subgroup of a finitely generated semi-direct product of them and the integers, but my method for that fails to generalize to $\mathbb{Q}$ due to the existence of infinitely many primes.

Best Answer

See this question and the answer by Jim Belk. The group is one of the "relatives" of the R.Thompson group $T$. This one is obtained by lifting Thompson's group $T$ through the covering map from the line to the circle. It is a natural finitely generated (even finitely presented) group, and it has been considered many times before by Ghys, Sergiescu and others.