English

A note about Jordan's bound on the size of finite linear groups

Group Theory 2026-03-18 v1

Abstract

In 1878 Camille Jordan showed that every finite subgroup GGLn(C)G\le\text{GL}_n(\mathbb C) has an abelian normal subgroup AA such that G/A\lvert G/A\rvert is bounded in terms of nn, but he did not give an explicit bound. An explicit bound was obtained by Blichfeldt in a series of papers beginning in 1904, using representation-theoretic methods. In 1911 Bieberbach gave a geometric proof, which is quite different from the approaches of Jordan and Blichfeldt, together with an explicit bound. Frobenius simplified this proof in the same year, and the resulting argument is still the simplest known. We present a self-contained and streamlined variant of Frobenius's argument, yielding the bound G/A25n2\lvert G/A\rvert\le25^{n^2}.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.15813,
  title  = {A note about Jordan's bound on the size of finite linear groups},
  author = {Peter Müller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.15813},
  year   = {2026}
}

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7 pages