Professor Mark Ronan, PhD
Part-time Teaching Fellow

Room 806
Tel:- 020-7679-2856
E-mail:- ronanuic.edu
Fax: 020-7383-5519

Research Interests
Group Theory, Buildings and Related Topics

My mathematical research is mainly in the area of group theory and geometry. Some of my early work was on geometries for the sporadic groups, and along with my colleague Stephen Smith in Chicago, we produced the first geometry for the Monster, assuming of course that it existed. Subsequent joint work with Gernot Stroth in Berlin led to a uniform analysis of all sporadic groups, some of which have very interesting geometries, though they do not fit into a general theory like those for the groups of Lie type.

The discovery of these groups (sporadic plus Lie type) yielded a complete list of all finite simple groups. The quest to find them all, and show there are no more, is described in my book Symmetry and the Monster.

My later work has been on geometries for the groups of Lie type, and groups of Kac-Moody type. These geometries are called buildings (nothing to do with buildings in the usual sense), and my book, Lectures on Buildings gives the basics of the subject. It was originally published in 1989 by Academic Press, and the present version — revised and updated — was published in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press.

For further details, please see my personal homepage.