Third homology of some sporadic finite groups (Q2330831)

The second integral homology group of a finite simple group is its Schur multiplier. In the case of the sporadic groups, the Schur multipliers were computed early on, and were all known by the early 1980s. The third integral homology group is a more esoteric invariant, and less immediately useful within group theory. The paper under review is motivated by possible applications to `moonshine' and conformal field theories. It gives the third homology groups for \(19\) of the \(26\) sporadic simple groups, and for \(9\) of the \(13\) non-trivial universal covering groups. A few of these results were already known, but most are new. The methods are largely computational, and both the methods and the calculations are described in detail in the paper.