Universitat Politècnica de València. Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Ministerio de Educación, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Ballester Bolinches, Adolfo, Cosme-Llópez, E., Esteban Romero, Ramón, Universitat Politècnica de València. Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Ministerio de Educación, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Ballester Bolinches, Adolfo, Cosme-Llópez, E., and Esteban Romero, Ramón
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Expositiones Mathematicae. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Expositiones Mathematicae, [Volume 34, Issue 3, 2016, Pages 327-334] DOI#10.1016/j.exmath.2015.07.005¨, A classical result of Gaschütz affirms that given a finite A-generated group G and a prime p, there exists a group G# and an epimorphism phi: G# ---> G whose kernel is an elementary abelian p-group which is universal among all groups satisfying this property. This Gaschütz universal extension has also been described in the mathematical literature with the help of the Cayley graph. We give an elementary and self-contained proof of the fact that this description corresponds to the Gaschütz universal extension. Our proof depends on another elementary proof of the Nielsen-Schreier theorem, which states that a subgroup of a free group is free.