A classification is given of rank 3 group actions which are quasiprimitive but not primitive. There are two infinite families and a finite number of individual imprimitive examples. When combined with earlier work of Bannai, Kantor, Liebler, Liebeck and Saxl, this yields a classification of all quasiprimitive rank 3 permutation groups. Our classification is achieved by first classifying imprimitive almost simple permutation groups which induce a 2-transitive action on a block system and for which a block stabiliser acts 2-transitively on the block. We also determine those imprimitive rank 3 permutation groups $G$ such that the induced action on a block is almost simple and $G$ does not contain the full socle of the natural wreath product in which $G$ embeds.
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 the theory of permutation groups. However, this is another instance of a situation common in mathematics in which a very natural problem turns out to be extremely difficult. Fortunately, the enormous progresses of the last few decades seem to allow a new momentum on the attack to this problem. In this paper we prove that there are infinite families of primiti…
We answer a question of Paterson, showing that all block systems for the group generated by the round functions of a key-alternating block cipher are the translates of a linear subspace. Following up remarks of Paterson and Shamir, we exhibit a connection to truncated differential cryptanalysis. We also give a condition that guarantees that the group generated by the round functions of a key-alternating block cipher is primitive. This applies in particular to AES.
For a set $Ω$ an unordered relation on $Ω$ is a family R of subsets of $Ω.$ If R is such a relation we let G(R) be the group of all permutations on $Ω$ that preserves R, that is g belongs to G(R) if and only if x in R implies x^{g}\in R. We are interested in permutation groups which can be represented as G=G(R) for a suitable unordered relation R on $Ω.$ When this is the case, we say that G is defined by the relation R, or that G is a relation group. We prove that a primitive permutation group different from the Alternating Group and of degree bigger or equal to 11 is a relation groups. The sa…
This is the fourth paper in a series. We prove a conjecture made independently by Boston et al and Shalev. The conjecture asserts that there is an absolute positive constant delta such that if G is a finite simple group acting transitively on a set of size n > 1, then the proportion of derangements in G is greater than delta. We show that with possibly finitely many exceptions, one can take delta = .016. Indeed, we prove much stronger results showing that for many actions, the proportion of derangements goes to 1 as n increases and prove similar results for families of permutation representati…
Delandtsheer and Doyen bounded, in terms of the block size, the number of points of a point-imprimitive, block-transitive 2-design. To do this they introduced two integer parameters, m and n, now called Delandtsheer--Doyen parameters, linking the block size with the parameters of an associated imprimitivity system on points. We show that the Delandtsheer--Doyen parameters provide upper bounds on the permutation ranks of the groups induced on the imprimitivity system and on a class of the system. We explore extreme cases where these bounds are attained, give a new construction for a family of d…
A triangle group is denoted by $Δ(p,q,r)$ and has finite presentation $$ Δ(p,q,r)=\langle x,y | x^p=y^q=(xy)^r=1 \rangle .$$ We examine a method for composition of permutation representations of a triangle group $Δ(p,q,r)$ that was used in Everitt's proof of Higman's 1968 conjecture that every Fuchsian group has amongst its homomorphic images all but finitely many alternating groups. We see that some of these compositions must give imprimitive representations, and in particular situations, where the representations being composed are all equivalent copies of an alternating group in the same de…
The computation of the normaliser of a permutation group in the full symmetric group is an important and hard problem in computational group theory. This article reports on an algorithm that builds a descending chain of overgroups to determine the normaliser. A detailed performance test in magma shows the improvement for large examples of intransitive and imprimitive groups.
Motivated by the maximal subgroup problem of the finite classical groups we begin the classification of imprimitive irreducible modules of finite quasisimple groups. We obtain our strongest results for modules over fields of characteristic 0, although much of our analysis carries over into positive characteristic. If G is a finite quasisimple group of Lie type, and K an algebraically closed field of cross characteristic, we prove that an imprimitive irreducible KG-module is Harish-Chandra induced. We then specialize to the case when K has characteristic 0 and apply Harish-Chandra philosophy to…
E. Artin described all irreducible representations of the braid group B_k to the symmetric group S(k). We strengthen some of his results and, moreover, exhibit a complete picture of homomorphisms of B_k to S(n) for n<2k+1. We show that the image of such ahomomorphism f is cyclic whenever either (*) n<k\ne 4 or (**) f is irreducible and 6<k<n<2k. For k>6 there exist, up to conjugation, exactly 3 irreducible representations of B_k into S(2k) with non-cyclic images but they all are imprimitive. We use these results to prove that for n<k\ne 4 the image of any homomorphism from B_k to B_n is cyclic…
This paper introduces the notion of orbit coherence in a permutation group. Let $G$ be a group of permutations of a set $Ω$. Let $π(G)$ be the set of partitions of $Ω$ which arise as the orbit partition of an element of $G$. The set of partitions of $Ω$ is naturally ordered by refinement, and admits join and meet operations. We say that $G$ is join-coherent if $π(G)$ is join-closed, and meet-coherent if $π(G)$ is meet-closed. Our central theorem states that the centralizer in $\Sym(Ω)$ of any permutation $g$ is meet-coherent, and subject to a certain finiteness condition on the orbits of $g$, …
A group K is said to be a B-group if every permutation group containing K as a regular subgroup is either imprimitive or 2-transitive. In the second edition of his influential textbook on finite groups, Burnside published a proof that cyclic groups of composite prime-power degree are B-groups. Ten years later in 1921 he published a proof that every abelian group of composite degree is a B-group. Both proofs are character-theoretic and both have serious flaws. Indeed, the second result is false. In this note we explain these flaws and prove that every cyclic group of composite order is a B-grou…
Suppose that $G$ is a finite, transitive, solvable permutation group acting on a set $S$ with $n$ elements. Let $G_0$ be the stabilizer of a point $α\in Ω$. Define the rank of a permutation group, denoted $r(G),$ as the number of distinct orbits of $G_0$ in $S$ (including the trivial orbit $\{α\}$). Huppert \cite{Huppert} and Foulser \cite{Foulser} classified all finite, solvable, permutation groups of rank two and three respectively, and Foulser restricted the rank four groups to a small list of possibilities. This paper completes the classification of all groups of rank less than $5$ by expl…
Let $G$ be a permutation group on a set $Ω$. A subset of $Ω$ is a base for $G$ if its pointwise stabiliser in $G$ is trivial. In this paper we introduce and study an associated graph $Σ(G)$, which we call the Saxl graph of $G$. The vertices of $Σ(G)$ are the points of $Ω$, and two vertices are adjacent if they form a base for $G$. This graph encodes some interesting properties of the permutation group. We investigate the connectivity of $Σ(G)$ for a finite transitive group $G$, as well as its diameter, Hamiltonicity, clique and independence numbers, and we present several open problems. For in…
The paper is an investigation of the structure of block-transitive automorphism groups of a 3-design with small block size. Let $G$ be a block-transitive automorphism group of a nontrivial $3$-$(v,k,λ)$ design $\mathcal{D}$ with $k\le 6$. We prove that if $G$ is point-primitive then $G$ is of affine or almost simple type. If $G$ is point-imprimitive then $\mathcal{D}$ is a $3$-$(16,6,λ)$ design with $λ\in\{4, 12, 16, 24, 28, 48, 56, 64, 84, 96, 112, 140\}$, and $rank(G)=3$.
We study the odd-characteristic structure of permutation modules for the rank 3 natural actions of $O_{2n}^{\pm}(2)$ ($n\geq3$) and $U_{m}(2)$ ($m\geq4$) on nonsingular points of their standard modules.
This article is about the mathematics of ringing the changes. We describe the mathematics which arises from a real-world activity, that of ringing the changes on bells. We present Rankin's solution of one of the famous old problems in the subject. This article was written in 2003.
The paper contains versions of the Strong Embedding Theorem and the Uniqueness Subgroup Theorem for groups of finite Morley rank and odd type which are needed for the study of permutations actions and modules in the finite Morley rank category.
In this paper we classify all maximal subgroups M of a nearly simple primitive rank 3 group G of type L=Omega_{2m+1}(3), m > 3; acting on an L-orbit E of non-singular points of the natural module for L such that 1_P^G <=1_M^G where P is a stabilizer of a point in E. This result has an application to the study of minimal genera of algebraic curves which admit group actions.
We characterise the primitive 2-closed groups $G$ of rank at most four that are not the automorphism group of a graph or digraph and show that if the degree is at least 2402 then there are just two infinite families or $G\leqslant \mathrm{A}Γ\mathrm{L}_1(p^d)$, the 1-dimensional affine semilinear group. These are the first known examples of non-regular 2-closed groups that are not the automorphism group of a graph or digraph.
This paper considers three imprimitive distance-regular graphs with 486 vertices and diameter 4: the Koolen--Riebeek graph (which is bipartite), the Soicher graph (which is antipodal), and the incidence graph of a symmetric transversal design obtained from the affine geometry $\mathrm{AG}(5,3)$ (which is both). It is shown that each of these is preserved by the same rank-9 action of the group $3^5:(2\times M_{10})$, and the connection is explained using the ternary Golay code.
Working in a theory with an integer-valued dimension on interpretable sets, we classify pseudofinite definably primitive permutation groups acting on one-dimensional sets which satisfy a version of chain condition on centralizers and on point-wise stabilizers. This generalises the classification of pseudofinite definably primitive permutation groups in supersimple theories of finite rank to supersimple theories of infinite rank.
The present survey aims at being a list of Conjectures and Problems in an area of model-theoretic algebra wide open for research, not a list of known results. To keep the text compact, it focuses on structures of finite Morley rank, although the same questions can be asked about other classes of objects, for example, groups definable in $ω$-stable and $o$-minimal theories. In many cases, answers are not known even in the classical category of algebraic groups over algebraically closed fields.
A permutation group $G$ on $Ω$ is called a rank 3 group if it has precisely three orbits in its induced action on $Ω\times Ω$. The largest permutation group on $Ω$ having the same orbits as $G$ on $Ω\times Ω$ is called the 2-closure of $G$. A description of 2-closures of rank 3 groups is given. As a special case, it is proved that 2-closure of a primitive one-dimensional affine rank 3 permutation group of sufficiently large degree is also affine and one-dimensional.
Given a permutation group acting on coordinates of $\mathbb{R}^n$, we consider lattice-free polytopes that are the convex hull of an orbit of one integral vector. The vertices of such polytopes are called \emph{core points} and they play a key role in a recent approach to exploit symmetry in integer convex optimization problems. Here, naturally the question arises, for which groups the number of core points is finite up to translations by vectors fixed by the group. In this paper we consider transitive permutation groups and prove this type of finiteness for the $2$-homogeneous ones. We provid…
A finite permutation group $G$ on $Ω$ is called a rank 3 group if it has precisely three orbits in its induced action on $Ω\times Ω$. The largest permutation group on $Ω$ having the same orbits as $G$ on $Ω\times Ω$ is called the 2-closure of $G$. We construct a polynomial-time algorithm which given generators of a rank 3 group computes generators of its 2-closure.
A permutation representation of a Coxeter group $W$ naturally defines an absolute order. This family of partial orders (which includes the absolute order on $W$) is introduced and studied in this paper. Conditions under which the associated rank generating polynomial divides the rank generating polynomial of the absolute order on $W$ are investigated when $W$ is finite. Several examples, including a symmetric group action on perfect matchings, are discussed. As an application, a well-behaved absolute order on the alternating subgroup of $W$ is defined.
In earlier work we gave a characterisation of pregeometries which are `basic' (that is, admit no `non-degenerate' quotients) relative to two different kinds of quotient operations, namely imprimitive quotients and normal quotients. Each basic geometry was shown to involve a faithful group action, which is primitive or quasiprimitive respectively, on the set of elements of each type. For each O'Nan-Scott type of primitive group, we construct a new infinite family of geometries, which are thick and of unbounded rank, and which admit a flag-transitive automorphism group acting faithfully on the s…
We describe the structure, including composition factors and submodule lattices, of cross-characteristic permutation modules for the natural actions of the orthogonal groups $O_{m}^{\pm}(3)$ with $m\geq6$ on nonsingular points of their standard modules. These actions together with those studied in \cite{HN} are all examples of primitive rank 3 actions of finite classical groups on nonsingular points.
A permutation group is called semiprimitive if each of its normal subgroups is either transitive or semiregular. Given nontrivial finite transitive permutation groups $L_1$ and $L_2$ with $L_1$ not semiprimitive, we construct an infinite family of rank two amalgams of permutation type $[L_1,L_2]$ and Borel subgroups of strictly increasing order. As an application, we show that there is no bound on the order of edge-stabilisers in locally $[L_1,L_2]$ graphs. We also consider the corresponding question for amalgams of rank $k\geq 3$. We completely resolve this by showing that the order of the Bo…
