Related papers: The Spread of Almost Simple Classical Groups
A brick is a $3$-connected graph such that the graph obtained from it by deleting any two distinct vertices has a perfect matching. A brick $G$ is near-bipartite if it has a pair of edges $\alpha$ and $\beta$ such that $G-\{\alpha,\beta\}$…
This is a survey of two papers joint with A. Borisov and a paper joint with I. Spakulova. It is based on my lectures at the conference "Groups St. Andrews 2009", Bath (August 2009). We prove that almost all 1-related groups with at least 3…
We show that a finitely generated subgroup of a free group, chosen uniformly at random, is strictly Whitehead minimal with overwhelming probability. Whitehead minimality is one of the key elements of the solution of the orbit problem in…
A group presentation is said to have rational growth if the generating series associated to its growth function represents a rational function. A long-standing open question asks whether the Heisenberg group has rational growth for all…
A theorem of Z. Arad and E. Fisman establishes that if $A$ and $B$ are two conjugacy classes of a finite group $G$ such that either $AB=A\cup B$ or $AB=A^{-1} \cup B$, then $G$ cannot be non-abelian simple. We demonstrate that, in fact,…
In this paper, we establish a complete structural description of flat Lorentzian Lie groups, i.e., Lie groups endowed with a flat left invariant Lorentzian metric, thereby resolving a long-standing open problem in the theory of…
Let $R$ be a semilocal principal ideal domain. Two algebraic objects over $R$ in which scalar extension makes sense (e.g. quadratic spaces) are said to be of the same genus if they become isomorphic after extending scalars to all…
In 1998, Mukherjee and Sankaran posed two problems concerning the algebraic structure of the equivariant bordism ring of smooth closed $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^k$-manifolds with only isolated fixed points. One is the property of being finitely…
Let G be a finite group. It has recently been proved that every nontrivial element of G is contained in a generating set of minimal size if and only if all proper quotients of G require fewer generators than G. It is natural to ask which…
Finite covers are a technique for building new structures from simpler ones. The original motivation to study finite covers is in the Ladder theorem of Zilber which describes how totally categorical structures are built from strictly…
We study the numbers of involutions and their relation to Frobenius-Schur indicators in the groups $\mathrm{SO}^{\pm}(n,q)$ and $\Omega^{\pm}(n,q)$. Our point of view for this study comes from two motivations. The first is the conjecture…
M. Field [5] refers to an unpublished work by J. Ize for a result that loss of stability through an absolutely irreducible representation of a compact Lie group leads to bifurcation of steady states. The main ingredient of the proof is the…
A quasi-semiregular element in a permutation group is an element that has a unique fixed point and acts semiregularly on the remaining points. Such elements were first studied in the context of automorphisms of graphs and occur naturally in…
We give an arithmetic criterion which is sufficient to imply the discreteness of various two-generator subgroups of $PSL(2,{\bold C})$. We then examine certain two-generator groups which arise as extremals in various geometric problems in…
In this paper, we study the primitive actions of almost simple exceptional groups of Lie type on \(s\)-arc-transitive digraphs. Our motivation is the following question posed by Giudici and Xia: Is there an upper bound on $s$ for finite…
The determination of scalars involved in Lusztig's conjecture for finite reductive groups $G(F_q)$ was achieved by Waldspurger in the case of symplectic groups or orthogonal groups, under the condition that $p,q$ are large enough. Here $p$…
The aim of the article is to show that there are many finite extensions of arithmetic groups which are not residually finite. Suppose $G$ is a simple algebraic group over the rational numbers satisfying both strong approximation, and the…
The statement ``no nonabelian simple group can be obtained from a nonsimple group by adding one generator and one relator" 1) is equivalent to the Kervaire--Laudenbach conjecture; 2) becomes true under the additional assumption that the…
Recursive algebraic construction of two infinite families of polynomials in $n$ variables is proposed as a uniform method applicable to every semisimple Lie group of rank $n$. Its result recognizes Chebyshev polynomials of the first and…
We employ techniques from group theory to show that, in many cases, counting problems on graphs are almost as hard to solve in a small number of instances as they are in all instances. Specifically, we show the following results. 1.…