Symmetries of surfaces (Q1091469)

A classical theorem of Hurwitz shows that the (conformal) automorphism group of a compact Riemann surface \(\Sigma_ g\) of genus \(g\geq 2\) has finite order bounded by 84(g-1). The author studies the reverse problem. Namely, let G be a finite group and define S(G) to be the set of all integers \(g\geq 2\) such that G appears as a subgroup of \(Aut(\Sigma_ g)\) for some compact Riemann surface \(\Sigma_ g\). The principal result in this paper is that S(G) together with a suitable finite set forms an arithmetic progression of the form \(1+kN\), \(k=0,1,2,..\). The modulus N depends on G. Namely, let \(p^{n(p)}\) denote the order of a p-Sylow subgroup of G and let \(p^{e(p)}\) denote the maximum order of a cyclic p-subgroup of G. In general, \(N=\prod p^{n(p)-e(p)}\) unless a 2-Sylow subgroup of G is not trivial and the elements of order less than \(2^{e(2)}\) in such a 2-Sylow subgroup generate a subgroup of index not equal to 2. In the ``exceptional case'', N is only half as large as in the ``general case'' (the reviewer has interchanged the two cases slightly from that of the author and made things ``less natural''). There are a number of interesting additional results and questions in this paper.