Michael O'Nan


Michael Ernest O'Nan was an American mathematician, specializing in group theory.
O'Nan received his PhD in 1970 from Princeton University under Daniel Gorenstein with thesis A Characterization of the Three-Dimensional Projective Unitary Group over a Finite Field. He was a professor at Rutgers University. In 1976 he found strong evidence for the existence of a sporadic group, which Charles Sims constructed. The group is now named the O'Nan group after O'Nan.
The O'Nan–Scott theorem in group theory is also named after O'Nan, who discovered it independently from Leonard Scott. It describes the maximal subgroups of the symmetric groups.

Selected works

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