Jan Saxl

Saxl was born in Brno, in what was at the time Czechoslovakia. He came to the United Kingdom in 1968, during the Prague Spring.[1] After undergraduate studies at the University of Bristol,[1] he completed his DPhil in 1973 at the University of Oxford under the direction of Peter M. Neumann, with the title of Multiply Transitive Permutation Groups.[2]

Saxl held postdoctoral positions at Oxford and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a lecturer position at the University of Glasgow. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 1976, and spent the rest of his career there.[1][3] He was elected as a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1986,[1] and he retired in 2015.[3]

Saxl published around 100 papers, and according to MathSciNet, these have been cited over 1900 times.[4] He is noted for his work in finite group theory, particularly on permutation groups, and often coauthored with Robert Guralnick, Martin Liebeck, and Cheryl Praeger. Some notable and highly-cited[4] examples of this work are as follows. Liebeck, Saxl and Praeger gave a relatively simple and self-contained proof of the O'Nan–Scott theorem.[5] It had long been known that every maximal subgroup of a symmetric group or alternating group was intransitive, imprimitive, or primitive, and the same authors in 1988 gave a partial description of which primitive subgroups could occur.[6][7]

Saxl was married to Cambridge mathematician Ruth M. Williams and they had one daughter, Miriam.[1]

Saxl died on 2 May 2020, after a long period of poor health.[1]

A three-day conference in the joint honor of Saxl and Martin Liebeck was held at the University of Cambridge in July 2015.[8]

Books

• Liebeck, Martin; Praeger, Cheryl; Saxl, Jan (2010). "Regular subgroups of primitive permutation groups". Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society. American Mathematical Society (AMS). 203 (952). doi:10.1090/s0065-9266-09-00569-9. ISBN 978-0-8218-4654-4. ISSN 0065-9266. MR 2588738. OCLC 457767029.
• Guralnick, Robert M.; Müller, Peter; Saxl, Jan (2003). "The rational function analogue of a question of Schur and exceptionality of permutation representations". Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society. American Mathematical Society (AMS). 162 (773). arXiv:math/0201069. doi:10.1090/memo/0773. ISBN 9780821832882. ISSN 0065-9266. MR 1955160. S2CID 7113361.
• Ivanov, Alexander A.; Liebeck, Martin W.; Saxl, Jan, eds. (2003). Groups combinatorics & geometry : Durham 2001. New Jersey London: World Scientific. ISBN 981-238-312-3. OCLC 228115554.
• Liebeck, Martin W.; Saxl, Jan, eds. (1992). Groups, combinatorics & geometry : Durham, 1990. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-40685-7. OCLC 839544039.
• Liebeck, Martin W.; Praeger, Cheryl E.; Saxl, Jan (1990). "The maximal factorizations of the finite simple groups and their automorphism groups". Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society. American Mathematical Society (AMS). 86 (432). doi:10.1090/memo/0432. ISBN 9780821861554. ISSN 0065-9266. MR 1016353.

Selected articles

• Liebeck, Martin W.; Praeger, Cheryl E.; Saxl, Jan (1988). "On the O'Nan-Scott theorem for finite primitive permutation groups". Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society, Series A. Cambridge University Press (CUP). 44 (3): 389–396. doi:10.1017/s144678870003216x. ISSN 0263-6115.