Metacyclic groups as automorphism groups of compact Riemann surfaces (Q1678560)

A compact Riemann surface of genus \(g \geq 2\) has at most \(84(g-1)\) automorphisms. If this bound is attained, the group \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\) is called a Hurwitz group, and there exist infinitely many \(g\) for which this happens. If one restricts to certain classes of groups \(G\), there appear smaller upper bounds for the order of \(G\), a subgroup of \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\). There are known bounds, for instance, for solvable, supersolvable, nilpotent, abelian, cyclic, or dihedral groups. The present paper deals with four classes of groups, namely groups with cyclic Sylow 2-subgroups, metacyclic groups, groups with all Sylow subgroups cyclic, and groups of square-free order. For each of them the author obtains a smooth upper bound, in the sense that the bound is attained for infinitely many values of \(g\), while there can be a finite number of \(g\) for which there exists a group \(G\) of order greater than the bound. As usual, the tool in order to get these results is the uniformization of Riemann surfaces and their automorphism groups by means of Fuchsian groups. The paper is very well-written, and includes a lot of very useful information.