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A Math Couple Solves a Major Group Theory Problem—After 20 Years of Work

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The McKay conjecture is one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory.

It says that if you want to formulate a thorough description of a group, you only need to look at a tiny piece of it.

Britta Späth and Marc Cabanes have finally proved the McKay conjecture.

The McKay conjecture predicted that a Sylow normalizer could give insights into a finite group’s overall structure.

If true, it would make mathematicians’ lives much easier to work with.

It would also hint at the presence of a deeper mathematical truth, one that mathematicians don’t yet have a handle on.

The project to classify all the building blocks of finite groups required thousands of proofs and took more than 100 years to complete.

Britta Späth , a graduate student at the University of Kassel , Germany , spent years working on the McKay conjecture.

Her work led them to develop a deep understanding of groups of Lie type.

By 2018 , they had just one category of Lie-type groups left, and the last case was done.