Beijing-Saint Petersburg Mathematics Colloquium (online)
Abstract
The question of which prime powers can occur as divisors of irreducible character degrees of finite groups has a long history. One related conjecture is given by Geoffrey Robinson in 1996, who conjectured that the p-part of character degrees in a p-block of a finite group can be bounded in terms of the center of a defect group of the block. I will mention recent progress on Robinson's conjecture for odd primes,and then turn to the question of when a p-block of a finite group G is also a q-block of G. A series related work have been done by Navarro-Willems,Bessenrodt-Mall-Olsson, Navarro-Turull-Wolf and etc. The block separation property is studied by Bessenrodt-Zhang and they proved that the nilpotency, p-nilpotency of a finite group can be characterized by intersections of principal blocks of some (quotient) groups. Thus it is natural to ask if the solvability or p-solvability of a finite group can also be characterized in this way. By introducing the so-called block graph of a finite group this problem was solved affirmatively. Finally, I will talk about a conjecture relating the trivial intersection of principal blocks to the existence of nilpotent Hall subgroups.
Bio
Dr. Yanjun Liu got Ph. D. from Peking University and is now working in Jiangxi Normal University. Recently He got Humboldt Research Fellowship based on his excellent work in some canonical conjecture of representation theory.
