Actions of large finite groups on manifolds

Abstract

In this paper we survey some recent results on actions of finite groups on topological manifolds. Given an action of a finite group $G$ on a manifold $X$, these results provide information on the restriction of the action to a subgroup of $G$ of index bounded above by a number depending only on $X$. Some of these results refer to the algebraic structure of the group, such as being abelian, or nilpotent, or admitting a generating subset of controlled size; other results refer to the geometry of the action, e.g. to the existence of fixed points, to the collection of stabilizer subgroups, or to the action on cohomology.

33 pages, the proof of Theorem 4.4 has been moved to arXiv:2112.05599(v2), comments welcome!