Martin W. Liebeck - Böcker

With the classification of the finite simple groups complete, much work has gone into the study of maximal subgroups of almost simple groups. In this volume the authors investigate the maximal subgroups of the finite classical groups and present research into these groups as well as proving many new results. In particular, the authors develop a unified treatment of the theory of the 'geometric subgroups' of the classical groups, introduced by Aschbacher, and they answer the questions of maximality and conjugacy and obtain the precise shapes of these groups. Both authors are experts in the field and the book will be of considerable value not only to group theorists, but also to combinatorialists and geometers interested in these techniques and results. Graduate students will find it a very readable introduction to the topic and it will bring them to the very forefront of research in group theory.

Since the classification of finite simple groups was announced in 1980 the subject has continued to expand opening many new areas of research. This volume contains a collection of papers, both survey and research, arising from the 1990 Durham conference in which the excellent progress of the decade was surveyed and new goals considered. The material is divided into eight sections: sporadic groups; moonshine; local and geometric methods in group theory; geometries and related groups; finite and algebraic groups of Lie type; finite permutation groups; further aspects of Lie groups; related topics. The list of contributors is impressive and the subjects covered include many of the fascinating developments in group theory that have occurred in recent years. It will be an invaluable document for mathematicians working in group theory, combinatorics and geometry.

Let K be an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero, and let G be a connected reductive algebraic group over K. We address the problem of classifying triples (G, H, V), where H is a proper connected subgroup of G, and V is a finite-dimensional irreducible G-module such that the restriction of V to H is multiplicity-free -- that is, each of its composition factors appears with multiplicity 1. A great deal of classical work, going back to Dynkin, Howe, Kac, Stembridge, Weyl and others, and also more recent work of the authors, can be set in this context. In this paper we determine all such triples in the case where H and G are both simple algebraic groups of type A, and H is embedded irreducibly in G. While there are a number of interesting familes of such triples (G, H, V), the possibilities for the highest weights of the representations defining the embeddings H < G and G < GL(V) are very restricted. For example, apart from two exceptional cases, both weights can only have support on at most two fundamental weights; and in many of the examples, one or other of the weights corresponds to the alternating or symmetric square of the natural module for either G or H.

This book gives a proof of Cherlin’s conjecture for finite binary primitive permutation groups.

Given such a classical group G, the three fundamental problems considered are the following: to list a representative for each conjugacy class of G; and to solve the conjugacy problem in G—namely, given two elements of G, establish whether they are conjugate, and if so, find a conjugating element.