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This paper presents an analysis of primitive permutation groups of degree $3p$, where $p$ is a prime number, analogous to H. Wielandt's treatment of groups of degree $2p$. It is also intended as an example of the systematic use of…
This is a transcript of a lecture course on Infinite Permutation Groups given by Peter M. Neumann (1940-2020) in Oxford during the academic year 1988-1989. The field of Infinite Permutation Groups only emerged as an independent field of…
This paper is originally designed as a part of revision of the author's preprint math.AG/9908174 "P-adic Schwarzian triangle groups of Mumford type". Recently, Yves Andr'e pointed out a flaw in that preprint; more precisely, Proposition II…
Recent classification of $\frac{3}{2}$-transitive permutation groups leaves us with three infinite families of groups which are neither $2$-transitive, nor Frobenius, nor one-dimensional affine. The groups of the first two families…
Terwilliger algebras are finite-dimensional semisimple algebras that were first introduced by Paul Terwilliger in 1992 in studies of association schemes and distance-regular graphs. The Terwilliger algebras of the conjugacy class…
We reinterpret ideas in Klein's paper on transformations of degree $11$ from the modern point of view of dessins d'enfants, and extend his results by considering dessins of type $(3,2,p)$ and degree $p$ or $p+1$, where $p$ is prime. In many…
As a consequence of the classification of finite simple groups, the classification of permutation groups of prime degree is complete, apart from the question of when the natural degree $(q^n-1)/(q-1)$ of ${\rm PSL}_n(q)$ is prime. We…
The main motivation for this article is to explore the connections between the existence of certain combinatorial patterns (as in van der Corputs's theorem on arithmetic progressions of length $3$) with well-known tools and theorems for…
Various connections between the theory of permutation groups and the theory of topological groups are described. These connections are applied in permutation group theory and in the structure theory of topological groups. The first draft of…
We prove a conjecture of Peter Neumann from 1966, predicting that every finite non-regular primitive permutation group of degree $n$ contains an element fixing at least one point and at most $n^{1/2}$ points. In fact, we prove a stronger…
The goal of this paper is to study primitive groups that are contained in the union of maximal (in the symmetric group) imprimitive groups. The study of types of permutations that appear inside primitive groups goes back to the origins of…
We study permutation groups of given minimal degree without the classical primitivity assumption. We provide sharp upper bounds on the order of a permutation group of minimal degree m and on the number of its elements of any given support.…
In 1933 B.~H.~Neumann constructed uncountably many subgroups of ${\rm SL}_2(\mathbb Z)$ which act regularly on the primitive elements of $\mathbb Z^2$. As pointed out by Magnus, their images in the modular group ${\rm PSL}_2(\mathbb Z)\cong…
Given a prime $p$, we construct a permutation group containing at least $p^{p-2}$ non-conjugated regular elementary abelian subgroups of order $p^3$. This gives the first example of a permutation group with exponentially many non-conjugated…
For finite-dimensional Hopf algebras, their classification in characteristic $0$ (e.g. over $\mathbb{C}$) has been investigated for decades with many fruitful results, but their structures in positive characteristic have remained elusive.…
This the first of a series of articles dealing with abstract classification theory. The apparatus to assign systems of cardinal invariants to models of a first order theory (or determine its impossibility) is developed in [Sh:a]. It is…
In this note we present a simplified and slightly generalized version of a lemma the authors published in 1987. The lemma as stated here asserts that if the order of a permutation of $n$ elements is greater than $n^{\alpha}$ then some…
The problem of describing the invariance groups of unordered relations, called briefly \emph{relation groups}, goes back to classical work by H. Wielandt. In general, the problem turned out to be hard, and so far it has been settled only…
The concept of formal duality was proposed by Cohn, Kumar and Sch\"urmann, which reflects a remarkable symmetry among energy-minimizing periodic configurations. This formal duality was later on translated into a purely combinatorial…
In his famous monograph on permutation groups, H.~Wielandt gives an example of a Schur ring over an elementary abelian group of order $p^2$ ($p>3$ is a prime), which is non-schurian, that is, it is the transitivity module of no permutation…