The conference Groups–St Andrews 1985 was held at the University of St Andrews from 27 July to 10 August 1985. The conference received financial support from the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, the London Mathematical Society and the British Council. There were 366 participants from 43 countries registered for the conference. Although the conference did not specialize in a particular area of group theory, a glance at Mathematical Reviews shows that the work of the participants is mainly under classifications 20D, 20E and 20F. In part this is because the conference followed an earlier conference [6] which was primarily based on topics falling under 20F.

It is well-known that the number of irreducible characters of a finite group G is equal to the number of conjugate classes of G. The purpose of this article is to give some analogous properties between these basic concepts.

Arithmetic subgroups of reductive algebraic groups over number fields are finitely presentable, but over global function fields this is not always true. All known exceptions are “small” groups, which means that either the rank of the algebraic group or the set S of the underlying S-arithmetic ring has to be small. There exists now a complete list of all such groups which are not finitely generated, whereas we onlyhave a conjecture which groups are finitely generated but not finitely presented.

The “other” pαqβ theorem of Burnside states the following:

Theorem A.l. Let G be a group of order pαqβ, where p and q are distinct primes. If pα>qβ, then Op(G)≠1 unless

(a) p is a Mersenne prime and q = 2;

(b) p = 2 and q is a Fermat prime; or

(c) p = 2 and q = 7.

By the results of Rickman [7] and Ralston [6], a finite group G admitting a fixed point free automorphism α of order pq, where p and q are primes, is soluble. If p = q, then |G| is necessarily coprime to |α|, and it follows from Berger [1] that G has Fitting height at most 2, the composition length of <α>. The purpose of this paper is to prove a corresponding result in the case when p≠q.

The idea of a pregroup was introduced by Stallings and provides an axiomatic setting for a well-known argument, due to van der Waerden, used to prove normal form theorems. Details are provided in [7], Section 3.

Let G be a group and K a field. We denote by (KG) the group of units of the group ring of G over K and for a group X we denote by T(X) the setof torsion elements of G i.e., the set of all elements of finite order.

If u and v are vertices of the (finite, connected) graph Γ, let d(u, v) denote the length of the shortest path joining u to v in Γ. The graph Γ is said to be distance-transitive if whenever d(u, v) = d(u′, v′), there exists an automorphism g of Γ such that ug = u′ and if vg = v′. Distance-transitive graphs of valency 3 and 4 were originally classified [2, 11, 12, 13] by using a computer to generate all “feasible intersection arrays” (cf. [1, Chapter 20]). In both cases a classification has since been given by hand [4, 5]. Wecontinue this latter tradition and prove the following theorem—which was recently proved independently by Ivanov et al. using a computer [10].

This paper concerns an application of an algorithm for the second derived factor group as described by Howse and Johnson in [3]. This algorithm has as its basis theFox derivative (see [1]), a mapping from the free group F to the group-ring ℤF, definedas follows: let X be a set of generators of a group G, and let w = y1…yk with each yi∈X±1.

Given any group G, its tensor square G ⊗ G is defined by the followingpresentation(see [[3]):

where g,g′,h,h′ range independently over G, and gh=ghg−1. In what follows, gg′ ⊗ gh is often written in the abbreviated form g(g′ ⊗ h).

For each finite group G, let G denote the set of all normal subgroups of the modular group Γ = PSL2(ℤ) with quotient group isomorphic to G; since Γ is finitely generated, the number NG = |G| of such subgroups is finite. We shall be mainly concerned with the case where G is the linear fractional group PSL2(q) over the Galois field GF(q), in which case we shall write (q) and N(q) for G and NG; for q>3, PSL2(q) is simple, so the elements of (q) will be maximal normal subgroups of Γ.

In his thesis, A. A. Hussein Omar, motivated by the study of possible shapes of generic Dirichlet regions for a surface group, made a detailed study for g = 2,3 of the groups generated by pairs (μ, τ) of regular (i.e. fixed-point-free) permutations of order 2,3 respectively and of degree n = 6(2g − 1), such that μ ْ τ is an n-cycle. He observed that, for g = 2,3, precisely one pair generates what he calls a superimprimitive group, and raised the question whether such pairs exist for all g, and, if so, whether they areunique. Our main result is that they do always exist, but that, for large values of g, theyare far from unique. (For details and some motivation for the notation, see [4, 5].)

Let G denote a relatively free group of a finite or countably infinite rank with a fixed set of free generators x1,x2,…,G′ the commutator subgroup, and V a verbal subgroup belonging to G′. Following H. Neumann [6] we shall use the vector representation for endomorphisms of G. Vector v = (ν1, ν2,…) represents an endomorphism v such that xiv = νi for all i. The identity map is represented by l=(x1,x2…). We need also thetrivial endomorphism 0 = (e, e,…). The length of vectors is equal to the rank of G. We shall consider the near-ring of vectors, with addition and multiplication given below u + v=(ulν1, u2ν2,…) where uiνi; is a product in G, and uv = (u1v, u2v,…) where uiv isthe image of ui, under the endomorphism v. There is only one distributivity law (u + v)w =uw + vw.

A k-tuple of members of a group is free if it freely generates a free group. In an earlier paper [1] the authors have shown:

The generalization of the Magnus embedding [7] proved by Smelkin [9] may bestated as follows. Let L be a free group freely generated by the set xi(i∈I), and let R be a normal subgroup of L with G = L/R. If V is any variety of groups and ∏ is the V-freegroup with free generating set the symbols [g, xi] (g∈G, i∈I), then L/V(R) is embeddedin the semidirect product ∏ ⋊ G (where the action of G on ∏ is given by h · [g, xi] = [hg, xi], for h, g ∈ G).

The modular group PSL(2, ℤ), which is isomorphic to a free product of a cyclicgroupof order 2 and a cyclic group of order 3, has many important homomorphic images. Inparticular, Macbeath [7] showed that PSL(2, q) is an image of the modular group if q ≠ 9. (Here, as usual, q is a prime power.) The extended modular group PGL(2, ℤ) contains PSL{2, ℤ) with index 2. It has a presentation

the subgroup PSL(2, ℤ) being generated by UV and VW.

Let K be a field, G a finite group. Let V be an (irreducible) KG-module, where KG is the group algebra consisting of all formal sums . The action of on α = ∑aθg on element ν ∈ V obeys the rule If H is a subgroup of G, then, restricting the action of G on V to H, V is also a KH-module. Notation: VH.