No label defined (Q4227571)

The paper is mainly a survey of material on infinite Jordan groups, but contains some new results. A Jordan group is a transitive permutation group \(G\) on a set \(\Omega\) such that \(\Omega\) has some subset \(\Gamma\) (a Jordan set) such that the pointwise stabiliser in \(G\) of \(\Omega\setminus\Gamma\) is transitive on \(\Gamma\) (and some non-degeneracy conditions hold). There is a structure theorem for infinite primitive Jordan groups due to the author and the reviewer, based on earlier work of the author and P. M. Neumann. In the present paper, some of the examples in the structure theorem are described, some of the easier lemmas for manipulating Jordan sets are given, and parts of the proof of the structure theorem are sketched. In particular, a proof is given for the case when the action on some Jordan set is primitive, which is slightly different from that of the author and Neumann, and doesn't rest on P. J. Cameron's description of highly homogeneous permutation groups which are not highly transitive. The paper also describes results (mostly from joint work with Neumann) on permutation groups whose elements have support bounded by some infinite cardinal (Jordan groups are involved). Then in Section 8 there is a new result in which it is shown that a primitive permutation group with a `syzygetic' set preserves a relational structure of known type (there is no Jordan hypothesis here). Finally, there are results on Jordan groups which preserve a linear order. A construction is given of such a group which also preserves a semilinear order. This group is primitive but not periodic or weakly doubly transitive or embeddable in the additive group of reals, and thereby answers an old question. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0899.00027].