Professor TIm Dokchister (University of Bristol)

will speak on

Names of finite groups

Time: 4:00PM
Date: Wed 13th April 2022
Location: Seminar Room SCN 1.25 [map]

Abstract: Classification and understanding of symmetries have fascinated mathematicians for a very long time. This is roughly the subject of modern group theory, and it goes back to at least the 18th century. I will explain what groups are and why some of them got much more attention than others. Giving names to finite groups turns out to be quite a non-trivial problem, and there is no currently accepted naming convention for them, despite their ubiquitous use in many areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry and crystallography. I will explain why this is difficult, what could be possible ways to solve this problem, and what we really mean by having a good classification of groups. This is closely related to the groupnames.org project, and I will describe it and mention some of the outstanding problems in computational group theory that it led to.

(This talk is part of the UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium series.)

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