Category Archives: exposition

a post aimed to teach something

Graphs defined on groups

Posted on 04/12/2020 by

Apologies; I have been so busy lately that very little has got written up. Let me try to remedy this with a quick tour through some recent mathematical developments. As some of my posts have hinted, one topic I have … Continue reading →

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A paradox, and where it led

Posted on 19/11/2020 by

What is the difference between a contradiction and a paradox? A contradiction is a dead end, a sign that the road leads nowhere and you should turn back and take the other road. A paradox, however, is an invitation to … Continue reading →

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Perfectness of the power graph

Posted on 04/10/2020 by

The power graph of a group is the graph whose vertices are the group elements (sometimes the identity is excluded but it doesn’t matter here), in which x and y are joined if one is a power of the other. … Continue reading →

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The Fitting subgroup

Posted on 14/09/2020 by

I have talked a bit about the Frattini subgroup. Time for its big brother. The definition of the Fitting subgroup F(G) of a finite group G is the unique maximal normal nilpotent subgroup of G. As such, of course, it … Continue reading →

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On the Frattini subgroup

Posted on 07/09/2020 by

I wrote earlier about the Frattini subgroup of a group. It can be defined in either of two ways (as the set of non-generators of a group, the elements which can be dropped from any generating set containing them; or … Continue reading →

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Integrals of groups revisited

Posted on 04/09/2020 by

After my trip to Florence in February, I wrote about the work I did there with Carlo Casolo and Francesco Matucci. After Carlo’s untimely death the following month, we were left with many pages of notes from him about the … Continue reading →

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Puzzle solution

Posted on 13/08/2020 by

Thank you, Honza, spot on. In 1964, Richard Rado published a construction of a universal graph, a countable graph which embeds every finite or countable graph as an induced subgraph. His graph turns out to be an explicit example of … Continue reading →

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Peter Sarnak’s Hardy Lecture

Posted on 27/06/2020 by

Yesterday, Peter Sarnak gave the London Mathematical Society’s 2020 Hardy Lecture (remotely). He talked about gaps in the spectra of connected cubic graphs. It was a talk properly described as a tour de force, applying to the problem ideas from … Continue reading →

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The geometry of diagonal groups

Posted on 18/04/2020 by

This is an interim report on ongoing work with Rosemary Bailey, Cheryl Praeger and Csaba Schneider. We have reached a point where we have a nice theorem, even though there is still a lot more to do before the project … Continue reading →

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The B. B. Newman Spelling Theorem

Posted on 06/04/2020 by

This is a guest post by Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda, a recent Masters student at St Andrews and currently a PhD student at the University of East Anglia. The story has personal resonance for me, because it turns out that B. … Continue reading →

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