I’ve added a new page of reading recommendations, mostly for undergraduates, to the top. The emphasis is intended to be on well-written and accessible books. Comments and suggestions welcome.
Archive for July, 2013
New page on reading recommendations
Posted in Uncategorized on July 31, 2013| Leave a Comment »
The p-group fixed point theorem
Posted in math.CO, math.GR, math.NT, tagged finite fields, fixed point theorems, group actions, walks on graphs on July 9, 2013| 13 Comments »
The goal of this post is to collect a list of applications of the following theorem, which is perhaps the simplest example of a fixed point theorem.
Theorem: Let be a finite
-group acting on a finite set
. Let
denote the subset of
consisting of those elements fixed by
. Then
; in particular, if
then
has a fixed point.
Although this theorem is an elementary exercise, it has a surprising number of fundamental corollaries.