Autoparatopisms of Quasigroups and Latin Squares

Paratopism is a well‐known action of the wreath product on Latin squares of order n. A paratopism that maps a Latin square to itself is an autoparatopism of that Latin square. Let Par(n) denote the set of paratopisms that are an autoparatopism of at least one Latin square of order n. We prove a number of general properties of autoparatopisms. Applying these results, we determine Par(n) for . We also study the proportion of all paratopisms that are in Par(n) as .     

Sylow Theory for Quasigroups II: Sectional Action

The first paper in this series initiated a study of Sylow theory for quasigroups and Latin squares based on orbits of the left multiplication group. The current paper is based on so‐called pseudo‐orbits, which are formed by the images of a subset under the set of left translations. The two approaches agree for groups, but differ in the general case. Subsets are described as sectional if the pseudo‐orbit that they generate actually partitions the quasigroup. Sectional subsets are especially well behaved in the newly identified class of conflatable quasigroups, which provides a unified treatment of Moufang, Bol, and conjugacy closure properties. Relationships between sectional and Lagrangean properties of subquasigroups are established. Structural implications of sectional properties in loops are investigated, and divisors of the order of a finite quasigroup are classified according to the behavior of sectional subsets and pseudo‐orbits. An upper bound is given on the size of a pseudo‐orbit. Various interactions of the Sylow theory with design theory are discussed. In particular, it is shown how Sylow theory yields readily computable isomorphism invariants with the resolving power to distinguish each of the 80 Steiner triple systems of order 15.     

Sylow Theory for Quasigroups

This paper is intended as a first step toward a general Sylow theory for quasigroups and Latin squares. A subset of a quasigroup lies in a nonoverlapping orbit if its respective translates under the elements of the left multiplication group remain disjoint. In the group case, each nonoverlapping orbit contains a subgroup, and Sylow's Theorem guarantees nonoverlapping orbits on subsets whose order is a prime‐power divisor of the group order. For the general quasigroup case, the paper investigates the relationship between non‐overlapping orbits and structural properties of a quasigroup. Divisors of the order of a finite quasigroup are classified by the behavior of nonoverlapping orbits. In a dual direction, Sylow properties of a subquasigroup P of a finite left quasigroup Q may be defined directly in terms of the homogeneous space , and also in terms of the behavior of the isomorphism type within the so‐called Burnside order, a labeled order structure on the full set of all isomorphism types of irreducible permutation representations.     

Self‐embeddings of cyclic and projective Steiner quasigroups

It is shown that for every admissible order v for which a cyclic Steiner triple system exists, there exists a biembedding of a cyclic Steiner quasigroup of order v with a copy of itself. Furthermore, it is shown that for each n≥2 the projective Steiner quasigroup of order 2ⁿ?1 has a biembedding with a copy of itself. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 19:16‐27, 2010     

The cup product of Hilbert schemes for K3 surfaces

To any graded Frobenius algebra A we associate a sequence of graded Frobenius algebras A ^[n] so that there is canonical isomorphism of rings (H ^*(X;ℚ)[2]) ^[n] ≅H ^*(X ^[n] ;ℚ)[2n] for the Hilbert scheme X ^[n] of generalised n-tuples of any smooth projective surface X with numerically trivial canonical bundle. Oblatum 25-I-2001 & 18-IX-2002?Published online: 24 February 2003     

Automorphisms of blocks of group algebras and character values

Let G be a finite group, χ an irreducible complex character of G and A(χ) the block ideal of the group algebra ℚG relatedℴ χ. The aim of this paper is to study the group Aut (A(χ)) of all ring (or ℚ-algebra) automorphisms of A(χ). Especially we are interested in the existence of subgroups of Aut (A(χ)), which are isomorphic to a given subgroup Γ of the Galois group of the field of character values ℚ(χ) over the rationals. In this context we prove some results related to character values.     

Self-Converse and Oriented Graphs among the Third Parts of Nearly Complete Digraphs

H into t isomorphic parts is generalized so that either a remainder R or a surplus S, both of the numerically smallest possible size, are allowed. The sets of such nearly parts are defined to be the floor class and the ceiling class , respectively. We restrict ourselves to the case of nearly third parts of , the complete digraph, with . Then if , else and . The existence of nearly third parts which are oriented graphs and/or self-converse digraphs is settled in the affirmative for all or most n's. Moreover, it is proved that floor classes with distinct R's can have a common member. The corresponding result on the nearly third parts of the complete 2-fold graph is deduced. Furthermore, also if . Received: September 12, 1994/Revised: Revised November 3, 1995     

Warped products of Hadamard spaces

In the Riemannian case, our approach to warped products illuminates curvature formulas that previously seemed formal and somewhat mysterious. Moreover, the geometric approach allows us to study warped products in a much more general class of spaces. For complete metric spaces, it is known that nonpositive curvature in the Alexandrov sense is preserved by gluing on isometric closed convex subsets and by Gromov–Hausdorff limits with strictly positive convexity radius; we show it is also preserved by warped products with convex warping functions. Received: 9 January 1998/ Revised version: 12 March 1998     

Decomposing thick subcategories of the stable module category

Let be the stable category of finitely generated modular representations of a finite group G over a field k. We prove a Krull-Remak-Schmidt theorem for thick subcategories of . It is shown that every thick tensor-ideal of (i.e. a thick subcategory which is a tensor ideal) has a (usually infinite) unique decomposition into indecomposable thick tensor-ideals. This decomposition follows from a decomposition of the corresponding idempotent kG-module into indecomposable modules. If is the thick tensor-ideal corresponding to a closed homogeneous subvariety W of the maximal ideal spectrum of the cohomology ring , then the decomposition of reflects the decomposition of W into connected components. Received: 27 April 1998 / In revised form: 16 July 1998     

Rigid Steiner Triple Systems Obtained from Projective Triple Systems

It was shown by Babai in 1980 that almost all Steiner triple systems are rigid; that is, their only automorphism is the identity permutation. Those Steiner triple systems with the largest automorphism groups are the projective systems of orders . In this paper, we show that each such projective system may be transformed to a rigid Steiner triple system by at most n Pasch trades whenever .     

The energy of Hopf vector fields

The 3-dimensional Hopf vector field is shown to be a stable harmonic section of the unit tangent bundle. In contrast, higher dimensional Hopf vector fields are unstable harmonic sections; indeed, there is a natural variation through smooth unit vector fields which is locally energy-decreasing, and whose asymptotic limit is a singular vector field of finite energy. This energy is explicitly calculated, and conjectured to be the infimum of the energy functional over all smooth unit vector fields. Received: 17 March 1999     

Chromatic Numbers of Cayley Graphs on Z and Recurrence

Dedicated to the memory of Paul Erdős In 1987 Paul Erdős asked me if the Cayley graph defined on Z by a lacunary sequence has necessarily a finite chromatic number. Below is my answer, delivered to him on the spot but never published, and some additional remarks. The key is the interpretation of the question in terms of return times of dynamical systems. Received February 7, 2000     

Degree‐ and Orbit‐Balanced Γ‐Designs When Γ Has Five Vertices

A Γ‐design of the complete graph is a set of subgraphs isomorphic to Γ (blocks) whose edge‐sets partition the edge‐set of . is balanced if the number of blocks containing x is the same number of blocks containing y for any two vertices x and y. is orbit‐balanced, or strongly balanced, if the number of blocks containing x as a vertex of a vertex‐orbit A of Γ is the same number of blocks containing y as a vertex of A, for any two vertices x and y and for every vertex‐orbit A of Γ. We say that is degree‐balanced if the number of blocks containing x as a vertex of degree d in Γ is the same number of blocks containing y as a vertex of degree d in Γ, for any two vertices x and y and for every degree d in Γ. An orbit‐balanced Γ‐design is also degree‐balanced; a degree‐balanced Γ‐design is also balanced. The converse is not always true. We study the spectrum for orbit‐balanced, degree‐balanced, and balanced Γ‐designs of when Γ is a graph with five vertices, none of which is isolated. We also study the existence of balanced (respectively, degree‐balanced) Γ‐designs of which are not degree‐balanced (respectively, not orbit‐balanced).     

List edge colourings of some 1-factorable multigraphs

The List Edge Colouring Conjecture asserts that, given any multigraphG with chromatic indexk and any set system {S _e :eE(G)} with each |S _e |=k, we can choose elementss _e S _e such thats _e s _f whenevere andf are adjacent edges. Using a technique of Alon and Tarsi which involves the graph monomial of an oriented graph, we verify this conjecture for certain families of 1-factorable multigraphs, including 1-factorable planar graphs.Supported by the University Research Council of Vanderbilt University and NSERC Canada grants A5414 and A5499.Supported by NSERC Canada grant A5499     

Axiomatization of abelian-by-G groups for a finite group G

We show that, for each finite group G, there exists an axiomatization of the class of abelian-by-G groups with a single sentence. In the proof, we use the definability of the subgroups M ⁿ in an abelian-by-finite group M, and the Auslander-Reiten sequences for modules over an Artin algebra. Received: 15 March 1996 / Published online: 18 July 2001     

More-Than-Nearly-Perfect Packings and Partial Designs

o (n) of the n vertices. Here we show, in particular, that regular uniform hypergraphs for which the ratio of degree to maximum codegree is , for some ɛ>0, have packings which cover all but vertices, where α=α(ɛ)>0. The proof is based on the analysis of a generalized version of R?dl's nibble technique. We apply the result to the problem of finding partial Steiner systems with almost enough blocks to be Steiner systems, where we prove that, for fixed positive integers t<k, there exist partial S(t,k,n)'s with at most uncovered t-sets, improving the earlier result. Received: September 23, 1994/Revised: November 14, 1996     

On the Sparsity Order of a Graph and Its Deficiency in Chordality

Given a graph G on n nodes, let denote the cone consisting of the positive semidefinite matrices (with real or complex entries) having a zero entry at every off-diagonal position corresponding to a non edge of G. Then, the sparsity order of G is defined as the maximum rank of a matrix lying on an extreme ray of the cone . It is known that the graphs with sparsity order 1 are the chordal graphs and a characterization of the graphs with sparsity order 2 is conjectured in [1] in the real case. We show in this paper the validity of this conjecture. Moreover, we characterize the graphs with sparsity order 2 in the complex case and we give a decomposition result for the graphs with sparsity order in both real and complex cases. As an application, these graphs can be recognized in polynomial time. We also indicate how an inequality from [17] relating the sparsity order of a graph and its minimum fill-in can be derived from a result concerning the dimension of the faces of the cone . Received August 31, 1998/Revised April 26, 2000     

The solution to a conjecture of Tits on the subgroup generated by the squares of the generators of an Artin group

Let A be an Artin group with standard generating set {σ _s :s∈S}. Tits conjectured that the only relations in A amongst the squares of the generators are consequences of the obvious ones, namely that σ _s ² and σ _t ² commute whenever σ _s and σ _t commute, for s,t∈S. In this paper we prove Tits’ conjecture for all Artin groups. In fact, given a number m _s ≥2 for each s∈S, we show that the elements {T _s =σ _s ^ms :s∈S} generate a subgroup that has a finite presentation in which the only defining relations are that T _s and T _t commute if σ _s and σ _t commute. Oblatum 21-III-2000 & 1-XII-2000?Published online: 5 March 2001