Counting modular irreducible characters (Q798417)

In a beautiful paper the author proved that the number of p-blocks of G with a given defect group D equals the rank of a certain matrix (with coefficients in \({\mathbb{Z}}_ p)\) depending only on certain group theoretic conditions. In this paper the ideas leading to the above result are extended to describe the number of modular irreducible characters which are contained in p-blocks with defect group (contained in) D. This result, as its predecessor, is of great theoretical interest. (B. Külshammer has extended the results further using the language of lower defect groups.)