London Algebra Colloquium abstract
Is Babai afraid of spiders?
Nick Gill (Open University), 17th March 2011
Abstract
I describe some interesting permutation group results that
emerged from a recent attempt to prove Babai’s conjecture for the
alternating groups. The work is joint with Helfgott, and with a number of
people from the University of Western Australia.
Specifically we study “mixing elements” in the natural action of An on
the set {1, . . . ,n}, and on k-tuples of distinct elements from {1, . . . ,n}. We
use “spider diagrams” to construct words of decreasing support; these
ideas lead to some interesting general questions . . .