Primitive permutation groups containing a cycle

The primitive finite permutation groups containing a cycle are classified. Of these, only the alternating and symmetric groups contain a cycle fixing at least three points. The contributions of Jordan and Marggraff to this topic are briefly discussed.Comment: 6 page

Regular dessins with a given automorphism group

Dessins d'enfants are combinatorial structures on compact Riemann surfaces defined over algebraic number fields, and regular dessins are the most symmetric of them. If G is a finite group, there are only finitely many regular dessins with automorphism group G. It is shown how to enumerate them, how to represent them all as quotients of a single regular dessin U(G), and how certain hypermap operations act on them. For example, if G is a cyclic group of order n then U(G) is a map on the Fermat curve of degree n and genus (n-1)(n-2)/2. On the other hand, if G=A_5 then U(G) has genus 274218830047232000000000000000001. For other non-abelian finite simple groups, the genus is much larger.Comment: 19 page

Unstable maps

A map which is non-orientable or has non-empty boundary has a canonical double cover which is orientable and has empty boundary. The map is called stable if every automorphism of this cover is a lift of an automorphism of the map. This note describes several infinite families of unstable maps, and relates them to similar phenomena for graphs, hypermaps and Klein surfaces.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Classification and Galois conjugacy of Hamming maps

We show that for each d>0 the d-dimensional Hamming graph H(d,q) has an orientably regular surface embedding if and only if q is a prime power p^e. If q>2 there are up to isomorphism \phi(q-1)/e such maps, all constructed as Cayley maps for a d-dimensional vector space over the field of order q. We show that for each such pair d, q the corresponding Belyi pairs are conjugate under the action of the absolute Galois group, and we determine their minimal field of definition. We also classify the orientably regular embedding of merged Hamming graphs for q>3