Category Archives: exposition

a post aimed to teach something

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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More on derangements

Posted on 04/04/2020 by

Francis Bacon, in The New Organon, developed a famous metaphor: Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners … Continue reading →

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Hall’s Marriage Theorem

Posted on 27/03/2020 by

Philip Hall was one of the greatest group theorists of the twentieth century. But it may well be that he is known to more people for a result which on the face of it is pure combinatorics, with nothing to … Continue reading →

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Research trips in February

Posted on 13/03/2020 by

I don’t know how things have got so busy. I had two interesting trips in February; I worked hard, and some interesting mathematics resulted; but I don’t seem to have found the time to describe it. So here goes. This … Continue reading →

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