English

Characterizing inner automorphisms and realizing outer automorphisms

Group Theory 2024-05-07 v1

Abstract

We give elementary proofs of the following two theorems on automorphisms of a finite group G: (1) An automorphism of G is inner if and only if it extends to an automorphism of every finite group containing G. (2) There exists a finite group, whose outer automorphism group is isomorphic to G. The first theorem was proved by Pettet using a graph-theoretical construction of Heineken-Liebeck. A Lie-theoretical proof of the second theorem was sketched by Cornulier in a MathOverflow post. Our proofs are purely group-theoretical.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.02992,
  title  = {Characterizing inner automorphisms and realizing outer automorphisms},
  author = {Benjamin Sambale},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.02992},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

11 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:17:17.041Z