" A proof of the Ore Conjecture. "

Aner Shalev (Jerusalem)

Abstract :

        A famous longstanding conjecture of Ore, posed in 1951,
        states that every element of a (nonabelian) finite simple
        group is a commutator. Partial results were obtained by
        many people. Very recently, in joint work with Liebeck,
        O'Brien and Tiep, we have proved the conjecture in full.

        In the talk I will sketch the proof, which combines
        representation theory with a complicated induction, where
        the base for the induction is itself quite challenging; it
        required methods from computational group theory and 3 years
        of CPU time.