The cohomology of the Sylow 2-subgroup of the Higman-Sims group (Q5954114)

Recently, the mod~\(2\) cohomology of every finite sporadic simple group of 2-rank \(\leq 4\) has been computed, with the exception of the Higman-Sims group \(HS\) and of the third Conway group \(Co_3\). The reason for these exceptions is that these two groups have large and complicated Sylow 2-subgroups, with many conjugacy classes of maximal elementary Abelian subgroups. In this paper, the authors compute the mod~\(2\) cohomology ring of the Sylow 2-subgroup of \(HS\). They obtain its Poincaré series as well as an explicit description of it as a ring with 17 generators and 79 relations. The calculation is long and highly technical involving techniques from topology, representation theory and computer algebra. These results will be used in a sequel to calculate the cohomology of \(HS\), and from there obtain information on the cohomology of \(Co_3\) (in fact \(HS\) is a big maximal subgroup of \(Co_3\)).