Variants of some of the Brauer-Fowler theorems (Q2182355)

A famous theorem of \textit{R. Brauer} and \textit{K. A. Fowler} [Ann. Math. (2) 62, 565--583 (1955; Zbl 0067.01004)] asserts that if \(t\) is any involution in a finite simple group \(G\), then the order of \(G\) can be bounded in terms of \(|C_G(t)|\). While this result has played a very important part in the history of the proof of the classification theorem, the bound given by Brauer and Fowler is very crude: They showed that \(|G|<(n(n+1)/2)!\), where \(n=|C_G(t)|\). The goal of this paper is to give some similar, but better bounds of this kind for arbitrary finite groups \(G\). Let \(G\) be any finite group of even order and let \(F(G)\) denote the Fitting subgroup of \(G\). The authors proved that \(|G:F(G)|<|C_G(t)|^4\) for each invotion \(t\) of \(G\), while they also showed the existence of an involution \(u\in G\) such that even \(|G:F(G)|<|C_G(u)|^3\) holds. A further interesting result of the paper that it gives a bound on fixed point subspaces of involutions. More specifically, it is proven that if \(V\) is a finite dimensional vector space over any field and \(G\) is an irreducible subgroup of \(\mathrm{GL}(V)\), which contains more than one involution, then there always exists an involution \(t\in G\) such that \(\dim (C_V(t))\geq \frac{\dim(V)}3\).