Ebook: Finite Groups 2003: Proceedings of the Gainesville Conference on Finite Groups, March 6-12, 2003

The 28 articles do not record the talks as given at the conference, but were prepared specifically for these Proceedings, and have undergone a strict refereeing process. Most of them present original research results with proofs, though a few are survey articles by group theory researchers. The conference was one of several events to celebrate the 70th anniversary of John G. Thompson, so many of the papers refer to his work. Among the topics are the classifying space and cohomology of Thompson's sporadic simple group, the Schur indices of cuspidal unipotent characters, analyzing ovals in finite projective planes using the representation theory of the symmetric group, and regular orbits of induced modules of finite groups. No index is provided.