Finitary representations and images of transitive finitary permutation groups (Q1969371)

This useful paper is very hard to summarize without getting very technical. Theorems giving conditions for an image of a finitary linear group to be isomorphic to some finitary linear group are sorely needed. Some are known, but examples show that the situation is likely to be much less satisfactory than the finite-dimensional linear case. The authors suggest an approach by taking a step back and considering which images of a transitive finitary permutation group can be isomorphic to a finitary permutation group. If a transitive finitary permutation group is not totally imprimitive, then its normal subgroup structure is very sparse (there are only finitely many normal subgroups) and relatively well understood. This focuses attention on the totally imprimitive case. Let \(G\) be an (infinite) transitive, totally imprimitive, finitary permutation group. The authors characterize those subgroups of \(G\) that can be a point stabilizer of some transitive, totally imprimitive, finitary permutation representation of \(G\) and those subgroups of \(G\) that can be the kernel of some transitive, totally imprimitive, finitary permutation representation of \(G\). Not surprisingly, the precise conditions are somewhat technical. The paper has a full (over three pages) and very readable introduction that gives a far better description of the content of this paper than I have been able to do here and I warmly refer readers to it.