A Survey: Bob Griess's Work on Simple Groups and Their Classification

Abstract

This is a brief survey of the research accomplishments of Bob Griess, focusing on the work primarily related to simple groups and their classification. It does not attempt to also cover Bob’s many contributions to the theory of vertex operator algebras. (This is only because I am unqualified to survey that VOA material.) For background references on simple groups and their classification, I’ll mainly use the “outline” book [1] Over half of Bob Griess’s 85 papers on MathSciNet are more or less directly concerned with simple groups. Obviously I can only briefly describe the contents of so much work. (And I have left his work on vertex algebras etc to articles in this volume by more expert authors.) Background: Quasisimple components and the list of simple groups We first review some standard material from the early part of [1, Sec 0.3]. (More experienced readers can skip ahead to the subsequent subsection on the list of simple groups.) Received September 12, 2016. AMS Subject Classification: 20D05, 20D06, 20D08, 20E32, 20E42, 20J06.