Classification of finite simple groups
Clasificación de los grupos simples finitos
- Date
- 1983 (completada en 2004) · confidence medium
- Place
- Columbus, Ohio (Ohio State) and dozens of other centres
- Credited to
- More than a hundred authors; coordinated by Daniel Gorenstein; Aschbacher and Smith closed the quasithin case (2004); the Feit-Thompson theorem (1963) as a milestone
- People
- 👤 Michael Aschbacher1944–
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Every finite simple group belongs to one of 18 infinite families or is one of 26 sporadic groups, the largest of them the Monster. The proof totals more than ten thousand pages spread across hundreds of papers.
The 1983 announcement proved premature due to a gap in the quasithin case, closed in 2004; the second-generation proof project is still ongoing.
What it led to
- modern finite group theory
- the monstrous moonshine conjecture (Borcherds, 1992)
- applications in combinatorics and codes
Built on
- Galois theory and group theory1832
- Theory of Lie groups1873-1874
- Feit-Thompson theorem