On rank 2 geometries of the Mathieu group .
Properties of -ary groups connected with the affine geometry are considered. Some conditions for an -ary -group to be derived from a binary group are given. Necessary and sufficient conditions for an -ary group -derived from an additive group of a field to be an -group are obtained. The existence of non-commutative -ary -groups which are not derived from any group of arity for every , is proved.
It is shown that the maximum size of a set of vectors of a -dimensional vector space over , with the property that every subset of size is a basis, is at most , if , and at most , if , where and is prime. Moreover, for , the sets of maximum size are classified, generalising Beniamino Segre’s “arc is a conic” theorem. These results have various implications. One such implication is that a matrix, with and entries from , has columns which are linearly dependent. Another is...