The main purpose of this paper is to exhibit the cutoff phenomenon, studied by Aldous and Diaconis [AD]. Let $Q^{*k}$ denote a transition kernel after k steps and π be a stationary measure. We have to find a critical value $k_n$ for which the total variation norm between $Q^{*k}$ and π stays very close to 1 for $k\ll k_n$, and falls rapidly to a value close to 0 for $k\ge k_n$ with a fall-off phase much shorter than $k_n$. According to the work of Diaconis and Shahshahani [DS], one can naturally conjecture, for a conjugacy class with...

If G is a group then the abelian subgroup spectrum of G is defined to be the set of all κ such that there is a maximal abelian subgroup of G of size κ. The cardinal invariant A(G) is defined to be the least uncountable cardinal in the abelian subgroup spectrum of G. The value of A(G) is examined for various groups G which are quotients of certain permutation groups on the integers. An important special case, to which much of the paper is devoted, is the quotient of the full symmetric group by the...

We obtain a presentation for the singular part of the Brauer monoid with respect to an irreducible system of generators consisting of idempotents. As an application of this result we get a new construction of the symmetric group via connected sequences of subsets. Another application describes the lengths of elements in the singular part of the Brauer monoid with respect to the system of generators mentioned above.