The main objective of this paper is the following two results. (1) There exists a computable bi-orderable group that does not have a computable bi-ordering; (2) there exists a bi-orderable, two-generated computably presented solvable group with undecidable word problem. Both of the groups can be found among two-generated solvable groups of derived length $3$.

(1) [a]nswers a question posed by Downey and Kurtz; (2) answers a question posed by Bludov and Glass in Kourovka Notebook.

One of the technical tools used to obtain the main results is a computational extension of an embedding theorem of B. Neumann that was studied by the author earlier. In this paper we also compliment that result and derive new corollaries that might be of independent interest.

To every dynamical system $(X,\varphi )$ over a totally disconnected compact space, we associate a left-orderable group $T(\varphi )$. It is defined as a group of homeomorphisms of the suspension of $(X,\varphi )$ which preserve every orbit of the suspension flow and act by dyadic piecewise linear homeomorphisms in the flow direction. We show that if the system is minimal, the group is simple and, if it is a subshift, then the group is finitely generated. The proofs of these two statements are short and elementary, providing straightforward examples of finitely generated simple left-orderable groups. We show that if the system is minimal, every action of the corresponding group on the circle has a fixed point. These constitute the first examples of finitely generated left-orderable groups with this fixed point property. We show that for every system $(X,\varphi )$, the group $T(\varphi )$ does not have infinite subgroups with Kazhdan's property $(T)$. In addition, we show that for every minimal subshift, the corresponding group is never finitely presentable. Finally, if $(X,\varphi )$ has a dense orbit, then the isomorphism type of the group $T(\varphi )$ is a complete invariant of flow equivalence of the pair $\{\varphi , \varphi ^{-1}\}$.

We construct total orders on the vertex set of an oriented tree. The orders are based only on up-down counts at the interior vertices and the edges along the unique geodesic from a given vertex to another.

As an application, we provide a short proof (modulo Bass–Serre theory) of Vinogradov’s result that the free product of left-orderable groups is left-orderable.

We show that the finitely generated simple left orderable groups $G_{\!\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}}$ constructed by the first two authors in Hyde and Lodha [Finitely generated infinite simple groups of homeomorphisms of the real line. Invent. Math. (2019), doi:10.1007/s00222-019-00880-7] are uniformly perfect—each element in the group can be expressed as a product of three commutators of elements in the group. This implies that the group does not admit any homogeneous quasimorphism. Moreover, any non-trivial action of the group on the circle, which lifts to an action on the real line, admits a global fixed point. It follows that any faithful action on the real line without a global fixed point is globally contracting. This answers Question 4 of the third author [A. Navas. Group actions on 1-manifolds: a list of very concrete open questions. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. 2. Eds. B. Sirakov, P. Ney de Souza and M. Viana. World Scientific, Singapore, 2018, pp, 2029–2056], which asks whether such a group exists. This question has also been answered simultaneously and independently, using completely different methods, by Matte Bon and Triestino [Groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of flows. Preprint, 2018, arXiv:1811.12256]. To prove our results, we provide a characterization of elements of the group $G_{\!\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}}$ which is a useful new tool in the study of these examples.

We investigate the bi-orderability of two-bridge knot groups and the groups of knots with 12 or fewer crossings by applying recent theorems of Chiswell, Glass and Wilson. Amongst all knots with 12 or fewer crossings (of which there are 2977), previous theorems were only able to determine bi-orderability of 499 of the corresponding knot groups. With our methods we are able to deal with 191 more.