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S Aug 21, 2017 at 11:02 history suggested user21230
Added tag sporadic-groups
Aug 21, 2017 at 10:40 review Suggested edits
S Aug 21, 2017 at 11:02
Apr 7, 2012 at 20:39 answer added Simon Lentner timeline score: 22
Mar 21, 2010 at 3:03 history edited Pete L. Clark CC BY-SA 2.5
edited title
Mar 12, 2010 at 19:01 vote accept REDace0
Mar 10, 2010 at 4:24 answer added S. Carnahan timeline score: 79
Mar 9, 2010 at 19:31 answer added Douglas Zare timeline score: 18
Mar 9, 2010 at 18:51 history edited Alon Amit CC BY-SA 2.5
added 2 characters in body
Mar 9, 2010 at 18:18 history edited Pete L. Clark
edited tags
Mar 9, 2010 at 17:22 comment added Qiaochu Yuan As a general comment, there are all sorts of "low-dimensional" obstructions restricting the isomorphism types of groups of small order, such as those coming from the Sylow theorems, and these obstructions become vanishingly less likely as you look at groups of large order.
Mar 9, 2010 at 17:00 comment added some guy on the street the other thing that occurs to me is that the sporadics I can sort-of remember are built as automorphism groups of certain combinatorial structures; now, those structures themselves look like generalizing in a few ways, but doing so could lead to several possibilities: e.g. their symmetries might split too much, so that the simple subgroups are too small; the desired generalization might not always exist; or the symmetry groups of the new structures may for arcane reasons be enumerated already among the classical groups.
Mar 9, 2010 at 16:51 comment added some guy on the street I feel like being perverse and remarking that all but finitely many simple groups are larger than any sporadic group, so the sporadic groups are actually comparatively small... I've a feeling the answer is going to be a disappointing something along the lines of how the smaller groups don't have enough room in which to be sporadic.
Mar 9, 2010 at 16:51 answer added Harrison Brown timeline score: 23
Mar 9, 2010 at 16:50 answer added Noah Snyder timeline score: 45
Mar 9, 2010 at 16:34 comment added Sonia Balagopalan One might even ask, why are there sporadic simple groups? If you are looking for intuition, maybe you should add the [soft-question] tag and make it wiki?
Mar 9, 2010 at 16:22 history asked REDace0 CC BY-SA 2.5