Designs and Finite Geometries brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area of mathematics. Designs and Finite Geometries serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

The proceedings of an AMS special session on finite geometries and combinatorial designs. Topics range over finite geometry, combinatorial designs, their automorphism groups and related structures.

This 1981 collection of 33 research papers follows from a conference on the interwoven themes of finite Desarguesian spaces and Steiner systems, amongst other topics.

When? These are the proceedings of Finite Geometries, the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference, which took place from Sunday 16 to Friday 21 July, 2000. It was organised by the editors of this volume. The Third Conference in 1990 was published as Advances in Finite Geometries and Designs by Oxford University Press and the Second Conference in 1980 was published as Finite Geometries and Designs by Cambridge University Press. The main speakers were A. R. Calderbank, P. J. Cameron, C. E. Praeger, B. Schmidt, H. Van Maldeghem. There were 64 participants and 42 contributions, all listed at the end of the volume. Conference web site http://www. maths. susx. ac. uk/Staff/JWPH/ Why? This collection of 21 articles describes the latest research and current state of the art in the following inter-linked areas: • combinatorial structures in finite projective and affine spaces, also known as Galois geometries, in which combinatorial objects such as blocking sets, spreads and partial spreads, ovoids, arcs and caps, as well as curves and hypersurfaces, are all of interest; • geometric and algebraic coding theory; • finite groups and incidence geometries, as in polar spaces, gener alized polygons and diagram geometries; • algebraic and geometric design theory, in particular designs which have interesting symmetric properties and difference sets, which play an important role, because of their close connections to both Galois geometry and coding theory.

Peter Dembowski was born in Berlin on April 1, 1928. After studying mathematics at the University of Frankfurt of Main, he pursued his graduate studies at Brown Unviersity and the University of Illinois, mainly with R. Baer. Dembowski returned to Frankfurt in 1956. Shortly before his premature death in January 1971, he had been appointed to a chair at the University of Tuebingen. Dembowski taught at the universities of Frankfurt and Tuebingen and - as visiting Professor - in London (Queen Mary College), Rome, and Madison, WI. Dembowski's chief research interest lay in the connections between finite geometries and group theory. His book "Finite Geometries" brought together essentially all that was known at that time about finite geometrical structures, including key results of the author, in a unified and structured perspective. This book became a standard reference as soon as it appeared in 1968. It influenced the expansion of combinatorial geometric research, and left its trace also in neighbouring areas.

A 1982 introduction to developments which had taken place in finite group theory related to finite geometries.

Difference sets are of central interest in finite geometry and design theory. One of the main techniques to investigate abelian difference sets is a discrete version of the classical Fourier transform (i.e., character theory) in connection with algebraic number theory. This approach is described using only basic knowledge of algebra and algebraic number theory. It contains not only most of our present knowledge about abelian difference sets, but also gives applications of character theory to projective planes with quasiregular collineation groups. Therefore, the book is of interest both to geometers and mathematicians working on difference sets. Moreover, the Fourier transform is important in more applied branches of discrete mathematics such as coding theory and shift register sequences.

This volume is the proceedings of a conference on Finite Geometries, Groups, and Computation that took place on September 4-9, 2004, at Pingree Park, Colorado (a campus of Colorado State University). Not accidentally, the conference coincided with the 60th birthday of William Kantor, and the topics relate to his major research areas. Participants were encouraged to explore the deeper interplay between these fields. The survey papers by Kantor, O'Brien, and Penttila should serve to introduce both students and the broader mathematical community to these important topics and some of their connections while the volume as a whole gives an overview of current developments in these fields.

This is the Proceedings of the ICM 2010 Satellite Conference on “Buildings, Finite Geometries and Groups” organized at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, during August 29 – 31, 2010. This is a collection of articles by some of the currently very active research workers in several areas related to finite simple groups, Chevalley groups and their generalizations: theory of buildings, finite incidence geometries, modular representations, Lie theory, etc. These articles reflect the current major trends in research in the geometric and combinatorial aspects of the study of these groups. The unique perspective the authors bring in their articles on the current developments and the major problems in their area is expected to be very useful to research mathematicians, graduate students and potential new entrants to these areas.