On the Cameron-Praeger Conjecture

This paper takes a significant step towards confirming a long-standing and far-reaching conjecture of Peter J. Cameron and Cheryl E. Praeger. They conjectured in 1993 that there are no non-trivial block-transitive 6-designs. We prove that the Cameron-Praeger conjecture is true for the important case of non-trivial Steiner 6-designs, i.e. for 6-$(v,k,\lambda)$ designs with $\lambda=1$, except possibly when the group is P\GammaL(2,p^e) with $p=2$ or 3, and $e$ is an odd prime power.Comment: 11 pages; to appear in: "Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A

On the existence of block-transitive combinatorial designs

Block-transitive Steiner $t$-designs form a central part of the study of highly symmetric combinatorial configurations at the interface of several disciplines, including group theory, geometry, combinatorics, coding and information theory, and cryptography. The main result of the paper settles an important open question: There exist no non-trivial examples with $t=7$ (or larger). The proof is based on the classification of the finite 3-homogeneous permutation groups, itself relying on the finite simple group classification.Comment: 9 pages; to appear in "Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DMTCS)

Divisibility graph for symmetric and alternating groups

Let $X$ be a non-empty set of positive integers and $X^*=X\setminus \{1\}$. The divisibility graph $D(X)$ has $X^*$ as the vertex set and there is an edge connecting $a$ and $b$ with $a, b\in X^*$ whenever $a$ divides $b$ or $b$ divides $a$. Let $X=cs~{G}$ be the set of conjugacy class sizes of a group $G$. In this case, we denote $D(cs~{G})$ by $D(G)$. In this paper we will find the number of connected components of $D(G)$ where $G$ is the symmetric group $S_n$ or is the alternating group $A_n$