The exact bounds for the degree of commutativity of a p-group of maximal class, I

Abstract The first major study of p-groups of maximal class was made by Blackburn in 1958. He showed that an important invariant of these groups is the ‘degree of commutativity.’ Recently (1995) Fernandez-Alcober proved a best possible inequality for the degree of commutativity in terms of the order of the group. Recent computations for primes up to 43 show that sharper results can be obtained when an additional invariant is considered. A series of conjectures about this for all primes have been recorded in [A. Vera-Lopez et al., preprint]. In this paper, we prove two of these conjectures.