Groups St Andrews

A series of conferences on group theory


The Groups St Andrews Conferences have been held every four years beginning in 1981. For a brief history of this conference series see the article Twenty-Five Years of Groups St Andrews.

The Proceedings of each of the conferences were published by Cambridge University Press. You can see the Introductions to these proceedings at THIS LINK.

We describe the social events for each of the Groups St Andrews conferences in more detail at THIS LINK.

A paper by C M Campbell about the Groups St Andrews Conferences is at THIS LINK.

Below we give the dates, main speakers and titles of the talks for the conferences together with other information.

Click on a year below to see the data from that year.        

  1981   1985   1989   1993   1997  
  2001   2005   2009   2013   2017

Groups St Andrews 1981


Held in St Andrews, Scotland, 25 July - 8 August 1981

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Joachim Neubüser (RWTH Aachen)
An elementary introduction to coset table methods in computational group theory

Derek Robinson (Urbana)
Applications of cohomology to the theory of groups

Sean Tobin (Galway)
Groups with exponent four

Jim Wiegold (Cardiff)
The Schur multiplier: an elementary approach

One-hour invited talks

Marshall Hall Jr (Caltech)
Burnside groups of exponent five

Donald Solitar (York, Ontario)
Subgroup theorems

F Rudolf Beyl (Heidelberg)
Isoclinisms of group extensions and the Schur multiplicator

Klaus W Roggenkamp (Stuttgart)
Units in integral group rings

Richard M Thomas (University College, London)
Finite simple groups: a survey

Frank Levin (Bochum)
Lie ideals in group rings

Malcolm J Wicks (Singapore)
Automorphisms of free groups

Christopher J B Brookes (Cambridge)
Centrality in infinite soluble groups

Verena Huber-Dyson (Calgary)
On the open sentence problem for finite groups

AnnChi Kim (Pusan)
Problems in Fibonacci varieties


Groups St Andrews 1985


Held in St Andrews, Scotland, 27 July - 10 August 1985

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK

A photograph of the principal speakers is at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Seymour Bachmuth (Santa Barbara)
Automorphisms of solvable groups

Gilbert Baumslag (CUNY)
A survey of groups with a single defining relation

Peter Neumann (Oxford)
Some algorithms for computing with finite permutation groups

Jim Roseblade (Cambridge)
Five lectures on group rings

Jacques Tits (Paris)
Buildings and group amalgamations

One-hour invited talks

John K Truss (Leeds)
Embeddings of infinite permutation groups

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Cohomology of locally nilpotent groups and applications

Roger C Lyndon (Michigan)
Coset graphs

Robert A Wilson (Birmingham)
Maximal subgroups of sporadic groups

Benjamin C Brewster (Binghamton)
Functors and their influence within the group

James Howie (Heriot Watt)
One-relator products

F Rudolf Beyl (Heidelberg)
The Schur multiplicator of SL(2,Z/mZ)SL(2, \mathbb{Z}/m\mathbb{Z}) and the congruence subgroup property

Andrew M W Glass (Bowling Green)
Lattice-ordered groups -- a very biased survey

Benjamin Fine (Fairfield)
The Picard group and the modular group

Robert W van der Waall (Amsterdam)
On Clifford's theorem and ramification indices for symplectic modules


Groups St Andrews 1989


Held in St Andrews, Scotland, 29 July - 12 August 1989

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK.

A photograph of the principal speakers is at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Pictures taken on the outing to Deeside are at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Sandy Green (Warwick)
Schur algebras and general linear groups

Narain Gupta (Manitoba)
Integral dimension subgroups

Otto Kegel (Freiburg)
Existentially closed finitary linear groups

Sasha Ol'shanskii (Moscow)
Some applications of graded diagrams in combinatorial group theory

John Thompson (Cambridge)
Galois groups

One-hour invited talks

John F Humphreys (Liverpool)
A survey of recent results on projective representations of the symmetric groups

Roger W Carter (Warwick)
Kac-Moody groups

Michael G Aschbacher (CalTech)
Subgroup structure of exceptional groups of Lie type

Martin Schoenert (RWTH Aachen)
GAP -- groups, algorithms, programming

Bernd Amberg (Mainz)
Triply factorized groups

Joachim Neubüser (RWTH Aachen)
Computing in soluble groups

Frank B Cannonito (Irvine)
Algorithmic theory of certain solvable groups

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Groups with the rewriting property P8

Avinoam Mann (Oxford)
Some applications of powerful p-groups

Hyman Bass (Columbia, NY)
Uniform tree lattices

Adalbert Kerber (Bayreuth)
Algebraic combinatorics: the use of finite group actions

David L Johnson (Nottingham)
Rational growth of wreath products

Stephen J Pride (Glasgow)
The (co)homology of certain infinite groups

Klaus W Roggenkamp (Stuttgart)
Observations on a conjecture of H Zassenhaus

Gerhard Rosenberger (Dortmund)
Generalizing algebraic properties of Fuchsian groups Part II

CAYLEY Workshop

Robert Sandling (Manchester)
CAYLEY: A group ring module for Cayley

Gerhard J A Schneider (Essen)
(i) CAYLEY: Representation theory
(ii) CAYLEY: The use of library and other facilities with Cayley

Eamonn A O'Brien (Marquette)
CAYLEY: p-groups and soluble groups

Edmund F Robertson (St Andrews)
CAYLEY: finitely presented groups


Groups St Andrews 1993 in Galway


Held in Galway, Ireland, 1 August - 14 August 1993

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Jon Alperin (Chicago)
Geometry, Steinberg representations and complexity

Michel Broué (Paris)
Rickard equivalences and block theory

Peter Kropholler (Queen Mary College, London)
Cohmological finiteness conditions

Alex Lubotzky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Counting finite index subgroups

Efim Zelmanov (Wisconsin-Madison)
Lie methods in group theory

One-hour invited talks

Hyman Bass (Columbia, NY)
Representations of finitely generated groups

Roger M Bryant (UMIST)
The finite basis problem for varieties of groups

Carlo Casolo (Udine)
Subnormal subgroups

R Keith Dennis (Cornell)
The number of groups of order n

Narain D Gupta (Manitoba)

Thomas J Laffey (Dublin)
Some results on conjugacy and factorisation of elements in GL(n,Z)GL(n,\mathbb{Z})

Geoffrey Mason (Santa Cruz , Ca.)
The quantum double of a finite group and its role in conformal field theory

Peter P Palfy (Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
Intervals in subgroup lattices of finite groups

Cheryl E Praeger (Western Australia)
Finite regularity of locally finite simple groups

Aner Shalev (Hebrew, Jerusdalem)
Recent developments in the theory of pro-p-groups

John S Wilson (Cambridge)
Economical generating sets for finite simple groups

François Zara (Amiens)
Some (G,X)(G, X)-groups

Workshop on Computational Group Theory and the use of GAP

Joachim Neubüser (RWTH Aachen)
Finitely Presented Groups - coset table methods

Derek F Holt (Warwick)
Finitely Presented Groups -- Knuth-Bendix and automatic groups

Herbert Pahlings (RWTH Aachen)
Representation theory -- computing characters

Klaus Lux (RWTH Aachen)
Representation theory -- Brauer characters

Meinolf Geck (RWTH Aachen)
Representation theory -- Chevalley groups

Michael F Newman (ANU, Canberra)
Collection methods -- p-quotients

Joachim Neubüser (RWTH Aachen)
Collection methods -- polycyclic presented groups

Akos Seress (Ohio)
Permutation groups -- membership testing

Derek F Holt (Warwick)
Cohomology groups

Charles R Leedham-Green (QMW, London)
Matrix groups

Leonard H Soicher (QMW, London),
Group, graphs and designs

Gruenbergtag

Brian Hartley (Manchester)
Modular relations and residual nilpotence

C Kanta Gupta (Manitoba)
Automorphisms and primitivity in relatively free groups

Peter J Webb (Minnesota)
Half a dozen ways to compute cohomology groups

Michael F Newman (ANU, Canberra)
Computing with Engel elements

Klaus W Roggenkamp (Stuttgart)
The isomorphism problem and Cech cohomology

Paul Fong (Illinois at Chicago)
Perfect isometries, isotypes and a conjecture

Thaddeus C Hurley (Galway)
Ucg, qmc, kwg and fgp


Groups St Andrews 1997 in Bath


Held in Bath, England, 26 July - 9 August 1997

More details (including copies of the Daily Group Theorist) are available at THIS LINK

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Laszlo Babai (Chicago)
A polynomial-time theory of black box groups

Martin Bridson (Oxford)
Non-positive curvature in group theory

Chris Brookes (Cambridge)
Group-theoretic applications of non-commutative toric geometry

Cheryl Praeger (Western Australia)
Primitive prime divisor elements in finite classical groups

Aner Shalev (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Probabilistic group theory

One-hour invited talks

Robert M Beals (Arizona)
Towards polynomial time algorithms for matrix groups

Ludmil Katzarkov (Irvine, California)
Projective surfaces, symplectic fourfolds and Burnside groups

Alexander Yu Ol'shanskii (Vanderbilt)
Centralisers and locally finite subgroups in free Burnside groups of large even exponents

Rostislav Grigorchuk (Texas A&M)
Burnside fractal groups and their presentations

Peter M Neumann (Oxford)
Burnside and his problem

John R J Groves (Melbourne)
Finitely presented soluble Lie algebras

Roger M Bryant (UMIST)
Lie powers of representations of finite groups

Andrea Caranti (Trento)
Graded Lie algebras related to the Nottingham group and to p-groups of maximal class

Nik Ruskuc (St Andrews)
Groups, semigroups and presentations

Stephen A Linton (St Andrews)
Recognising GLn(q)GL_{n}(q)

Herbert Pahlings (RWTH Aachen)
Checking Dade's conjectures

Charles F Miller III (Melbourne)
Asphericity and decision problems

Victor S Guba (Vologda, Russia)
On the Dehn function of R Thompson's group

Alexander Yu Ol'shanskii (Vanderbilt)
On subgroup distortion

Antonio Vera-Lopez (Bilbao)
On p-groups of maximal class

Peter P Palfy (Budapest)
On the character degree graph of soluble groups

Akos Seress (Ohio)
Black box classical groups


Groups St Andrews 2001 in Oxford


Held in Oxford, England, 5 August - 18 August 2001

More details (including photographs, etc.) are available at THIS LINK

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Marston Conder (Auckland)
Group actions on graphs, maps and surfaces with maximum symmetry

Persi Diaconis (Stanford)
Random walks on groups: characters and geometry

Peter Palfy (Eötvös Loránd, Budapest)
Groups and lattices

Marcus du Sautoy (Cambridge),
Zeta functions of groups: the quest for order versus the flight from ennui

Mike Vaughan-Lee (Christ Church, Oxford)
Lie methods in group theory

One-hour invited talks

Markku Niemenmaa (Oulu, Finland)
On the relationship between group theory and loop theory

Dessislava Kochloukova (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Invariants of discrete groups, Lie algebras and pro-p groups

Lawrence E Wilson (Chicago, USA)
Powerful p-groups are power-abelian

Andrea Caranti (Trento)
Graded Lie algebras of maximal class

Gunnar Traustason (Marseille and Lund)
On Engel groups

Jan Krempa (Warsaw)
On free submonoids of groups

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
Derivations and the permutability of subgroups in polycyclic-by-finite groups

Richard M Thomas (Leicester)
Groups and string rewriting

Ron Solomon (Ohio)
Danny and odd types

Bernd Stellmacher (Kiel)
Groups of characteristic p

Richard N Lyons (Rutgers)
Danny, the generic group theorist

Paul Flavell (Birmingham)
Coprime action on finite groups

George Havas (Queensland)
Andrews-Curtis and Todd-Coxeter proof words

Simon R Thomas (Rutgers)
The complexity of classification problems for classes of countable groups

H Dugald MacPherson (Leeds)
Polish groups and automorphism groups

Slawomir J Solecki (Indiana)
Groups with metric topologies and their applications

Simon R Thomas (Rutgers)
Superrigidity and Borel equivalence relations

Alexander S Kechris (Caltech)
Cosets of groups


Groups St Andrews 2005


Held in St Andrews, Scotland, 30 July - 6 August 2005

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK.

More details (including photographs, etc.) are available at THIS LINK

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Peter Cameron (Queen Mary, London)
Aspects of infinite permutation groups;

Slava Grigorchuk (Texas A&M)
On self-similarity and branching in group theory

John Meakin (Nebraska-Lincoln)
Interactions between group theory and semigroup theory

Akos Seress (Ohio State)
Graphs, automorphisms, and product action

One-hour invited talks

Peter M Neumann (Oxford)
The second memoir of Évariste Galois

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
The Maier-Schmid problem for infinite groups

George Havas (Queensland)

Alice C Niemeyer (Western Australia)

Peter H Kropholler (Glasgow)
A generalization of the Lyndon-Hochschild-Serre spectral sequence and some applications to geometric group theory

Robert W van der Waall (Amsterdam)
On n-isoclinic groups

Ben Fine (Fairfield)
On surface groups: motivating examples in combinatorial group theory


Groups St Andrews 2009


Held in Bath, England, 1 August - 15 August 2009

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK.

More details (including slides of presentations) are available at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Gerhard Hiss (RWTH, Aachen, Germany)
Finite groups of Lie type and their representations

Volodymyr Nekrashevych (Texas A&M, Texas, USA)
Iterated monodromy groups

Dan Segal (All Souls College, Oxford)
Words and groups

Eamonn O'Brien (Auckland, New Zealand)
Effective algorithmic approaches for linear groups

Mark Sapir (Vanderbilt, Nashville, USA)
Residually finite groups, random walks and dynamics of polynomial maps over p-adics

Plenary Talks

Simon R Blackburn (Royal Holloway)
Group theory in cryptography

Marian Deaconescu (Kuwait)
Automotives

Ben Fine (Fairfield)
One relator groups: A systematic approach

Waldemar Holubowski (Gliwice)
Subgroups of infinite matrices

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
Generalized Baumslag-Solitar groups

Gerhard Rosenberger (Dortmund)
Subgroups generated by the solution sets of quadratic equations in group amalgams

B H Neumann Day

Peter M Neumann (Oxford)
Some classic and nearly classic problems on varieties of groups

Michael Vaughan-Lee (Oxford)
The Hughes Problem

Cheryl E Praeger (Western Australia)
Neumann: one hundred years

Waldemar Holubowski (Gliwice)
On free groups in the variety generated by a finite group

Francesco Russo (Naples)
A different formulation of a result of B H Neumann

Luise-Charlotte Kappe (SUNY, Binghamton)
Finite coverings: a journey through groups, loops, rings and semigroups

Walter D Neumann (Columbia)
Quasi-isometry of 3-manifold groups

Gilbert Baumslag (CUNY)
Remembering Bernhard Neumann

Cannon and Holt Day

George Havas (Queensland)
On one-relator quotients of the modular group

Claas Röver (Galway)
Languages in group theory

Marston D E Conder (Auckland)
Finding normal subgroups of small index in finitely-presented groups

Richard M Thomas (Leicester)
Some generalizations from groups to semigroups

Stephen P Glasby (Central Washington)
Computing the Frobenius normal form

Scott Murray (Sydney)
An application of Magma to groups acting on trees

Colva M Roney-Dougal (St Andrews)
Maximal subgroups of finite groups

Charles R Leedham-Green (QMUL)
Classifying p-groups

Engel Groups Day

Gunnar Traustason (Bath)
Engel groups

Olga Macedonska (Gliwice)
On Engel and positive laws

Patrizia Longobardi (Salerno)
Engel conditions on orderable groups and in combinatorial problems

Primoz Moravec (Ljubljana)
Schur multipliers of 4-Engel groups

Robert F Morse (Evansville)
Levi-properties in groups: The Engel connection

Serena Cicalò (Trento)
Constructing n-Engel Lie rings

Alireza Abdollahi (Isfahan, Iran)
Engel elements in groups

Michael Vaughan-Lee (Oxford)
Lie ring methods in Engel groups


Groups St Andrews 2013


Held in St Andrews, Scotland, 3 August - 11 August 2013

More details (including abstracts and slides of presentations) are available at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Emmanuel Breuillard (Paris-Sud 11)
Approximate subgroups and super-strong approximation

Martin W Liebeck (Imperial College, London)
Width questions for finite simple groups

Alan W Reid (Texas at Austin)
Profinite properties of discrete groups

Karen Vogtmann (Cornell)
GL(n,Z),Out(Fn)GL(n, \mathbb{Z}), Out(F_{n}) and everything in between: automorphism groups of RAAGs

One-hour invited talks

Peter J Cameron (St Andrews)
Permutation groups and transformation semigroups: results and problems

Radha Kessar (City University, London)
On the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the cohomology of fusion systems and of the Hochschild cohomology of block designs

Markus Lohrey (Leipzig)
The rational subset membership problem for groups: a survey

Derek J S Robinson (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Generalized Baumslag-Solitar groups: a survey of recent progress

Christopher Voll (Bielefeld)
Zeta functions of groups and rings -- recent developments


Groups St Andrews 2017


Held in Birmingham, England, 5 August - 13 August 2017

The Conference photograph is at THIS LINK.

More details (including abstracts and slides of presentations) are available at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The Preface to the Proceedings for this conference are at THIS LINK.

The social events for this conference are described at THIS LINK.

Main Speakers

Michael Aschbacher (Caltech)
Finite simple groups and fusion systems

Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Locally compact groups beyond Lie theory

Radha Kessar (City, University of London)
On characters and p-blocks of finite simple groups

Gunter Malle (TU Kaiserslautern)
Local-global conjectures

One-hour invited talks

Tim Burness (University of Bristol)
Simple groups, generation and probabilistic methods

Vincent Guirardel (Université de Rennes 1)
Boundaries for Out(Fn)Out (F_{n})

Harald Helfgott (University of Göttingen)
The diameter of the symmetric group: ideas and tools

Andrei Jaikin-Zapirain (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
On l2 -Betti numbers and their analogues in positive characteristic

Donna Testerman (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Representations and subgroup structure of simple algebraic groups

Compiled by Colin M Campbell