Brauer's fixed-point-formula as a consequence of Thompson's order-formula

A presentation and a representation of the Held group

In this note we give a brief description of a new presentation of the Held group, which is deduced only from the original work of D. Held in 1969, who shows that a finite simple group, having the same centralizer of a 2-central involution as in the Mathieu group M24, is M24, L5(2) or a group of order 4.030.387.200. The first complete uniqueness proof for the latter case was given by L. Soicher in 1991. The generators and relations occurring here are easy to verify by a simple Todd–Coxeter algorithm. It is an easy task to get a new uniqueness and existence proof of the Held group from this result. Also basic facts like the Schur Multiplier or the automorphism group of the Held group follow f…

A character-theory-free characterization of the Mathieu group M12

AbstractThe known characterization of the Mathieu group M12 by the structure of the centralizer of a 2-central involution is based on the application of the theory of exceptional characters and uses in addition a block theoretic result which asserts that a simple group of order |M12| is isomorphic to M12. The details of the proof of the latter result had never been published. We show here that M12 can be handled in a completely elementary and group theoretical way.