A Geometric Characterization of Fischer's Baby Monster

The sporadic simple group F₂ known as Fischer's Baby Monster acts flag-transitively on a rank 5 P-geometry . P-geometries are geometries with string diagrams, all of whose nonempty edges except one are projective planes of order 2 and one terminal edge is the geometry of the Petersen graph. Let be a flag-transitive P-geometry of rank 5. Suppose that each proper residue of is isomorphic to the corresponding residue in . We show that in this case is isomorphic to . This result realizes a step in classification of the flag-transitive P-geometries and also plays an important role in the characterization of the Fischer–Griess Monster in terms of its 2-local parabolic geometry.