Sharp characters of quasigroups (Q1209726)

The idea of a sharp permutation character of a group arises from combinatorial considerations. Recent work, founded on early results of H. F. Blichfeldt published in 1904, has shown that the definition of sharpness can be extended to arbitrary group characters, and in fact it has emerged that the natural object to define is a sharp triple. In the present paper the definition is extended further to quasigroup characters. Another aspect of the paper presented deserves comment at this stage. The quasigroup character theory in works of the author is developed via the association scheme which arises naturally from the classes, and the quasigroup character table is a renormalized version of that of the association scheme. The results presented by author in this paper can be thought of as providing further evidence that the theory of quasigroup characters is distinct from that of arbitrary association scheme characters. In this paper examples are presented which indicate how the generalized theory diverges from that of groups, and which demonstrate that sharp triples do indeed exist for quasigroup characters. Results on sharp characters are presented, which are in part analogous to some of those produced for groups.