(MC-DAG-5) 5-day minicourse on Permutation Groups by Prof. Peter J. Cameron School of Mathematics Queen Mary and Westfield College London, UK

Prof. Cameron was born 23 January 1947 in Toowoomba, Australia. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Queensland and a D.Phil from Oxford University, U.K., where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Subsequently he was a Junior Research Fellow and then a Tutorial fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at QMW College, University of London. He was awarded the London Mathematical Society's Junior Whitehead Prize in 1979, and spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1990. He spent a term at the California Institute of Technology as Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar. His mathematical work might be loosely described as on "Groups and their Operands", where these may be a wide range of discrete structures: graphs, designs, codes, topological spaces, posets, etc. As a result, he has worked not only in group theory but also in combinatorics, coding theory, and model theory. He is currently the chairman of the British Combinatorial Committee and has recently organised the Sixteenth Combinatorial Conference.

Contents
The subject of finite permutation groups has been transformed by the classification of the finite simple groups. Using the O'Nan-Scott Theorem, it is now possible to bring this classification to bear on many classical and modern problems in the area, among which some of the most famous are the classification of multiply transitive groups and bounds on the order of primitive groups. The area of infinite permutation groups is, by contrast, very little affected by the classification. Various sub-areas have been studied, usually with some finiteness condition. Perhaps the most interesting such condition is that of "oligomorphy", that is, the group should have only a finite number of orbits on the set of n-tuples for each natural number n. Oligomorphic groups are intimately related to certain combinatorial enumeration problems and to omega-categorical structures in model theory. The course will cover both of these areas, concentrating on the techniques which have been developed but also describing some of the most important results.

Text books
P.J. Cameron, Oligomorphic Permutation Groups, London Math. Soc., Lecture Notes 152, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
J.D. Dixon and B. Mortimer, Permutation Groups, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1996.

Time and place
Eindhoven University of Technology, 10 through 14 November 1997.

Admission fee
All courses are free for students and members of research groups affiliated with EIDMA. For other participants, an amount of NLG 1,500.- is due. Reductions may apply to students and members of other scientific institutes.

Registration:
You can register by sending an e-mail to eidma@win.tue.nl