We prove that for any prime power $q\notin \{3,4,5\}$ , the cubic extension $\mathbb {F}_{q^{3}}$ of the finite field $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ contains a primitive element $\xi $ such that $\xi +\xi ^{-1}$ is also primitive, and $\operatorname {\mathrm {Tr}}_{\mathbb {F}_{q^{3}}/\mathbb {F}_{q}}(\xi )=a$ for any prescribed $a\in \mathbb {F}_{q}$ . This completes the proof of a conjecture of Gupta et al. [‘Primitive element pairs with one prescribed trace over a finite field’, Finite Fields Appl. 54 (2018), 1–14] concerning the analogous problem over an extension of arbitrary degree $n\ge 3$ .

We prove that immersions of planar domains are uniquely specified by their Jacobian determinant, curl function and boundary values. This settles the two-dimensional version of an outstanding conjecture related to a particular grid generation method in computer graphics.

Stark conjectured that for any $h\in \Bbb {N}$ , there are only finitely many CM-fields with class number h. Let $\mathcal {C}$ be the class of number fields L for which L has an almost normal subfield K such that $L/K$ has solvable Galois closure. We prove Stark’s conjecture for $L\in \mathcal {C}$ of degree greater than or equal to 6. Moreover, we show that the generalised Brauer–Siegel conjecture is true for asymptotically good towers of number fields $L\in \mathcal {C}$ and asymptotically bad families of $L\in \mathcal {C}$ .

We show that there exists a continuous function from the unit Lebesgue interval to itself such that for any $\epsilon \geq 0$ and any natural number k, any point in its domain has an $\epsilon $ -neighbourhood which, when feasible, contains k mutually disjoint extremally scrambled sets of identical Lebesgue measure, homeomorphic to each other. This result enables a satisfying generalisation of Li–Yorke (topological) chaos and suggests an open (difficult) problem as to whether the result is valid for piecewise linear functions.

Let $\eta (G)$ be the number of conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups of G. We prove that if G is a p-group of order $p^n$ and nilpotence class l, then $\eta (G)$ is bounded below by a linear function in $n/l$ .

Based on the work of Mauldin and Williams [‘On the Hausdorff dimension of some graphs’, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 298(2) (1986), 793–803] on convex Lipschitz functions, we prove that fractal interpolation functions belong to the space of convex Lipschitz functions under certain conditions. Using this, we obtain some dimension results for fractal functions. We also give some bounds on the fractal dimension of fractal functions with the help of oscillation spaces.

Motivated by considerations of the quadratic orthogonal bisectional curvature, we address the question of when a weighted graph (with possibly negative weights) has nonnegative Dirichlet energy.

We investigate the notion of relatively amenable topological action and show that the action of Thompson’s group T on $S^1$ is relatively amenable with respect to Thompson’s group F. We use this to conclude that F is exact if and only if T is exact. Moreover, we prove that the groupoid of germs of the action of T on $S^1$ is Borel amenable.

We consider the $L^{p}$ -regularity of the Szegö projection on the symmetrised polydisc $\mathbb {G}_{n}$ . In the setting of the Hardy space corresponding to the distinguished boundary of the symmetrised polydisc, it is shown that this operator is $L^{p}$ -bounded for $p\in (2-{1}/{n}, 2+{1}/{(n-1)})$ .

We investigate unbounded, linear operators arising from a finite sum of composition operators on Fock space. Real symmetry and complex symmetry of these operators are characterised.

We present a family of counterexamples to a question proposed recently by Moretó concerning the character codegrees and the element orders of a finite solvable group.

Let $\pi $ be a set of primes. We say that a group G satisfies $D_{\pi }$ if G possesses a Hall $\pi $ -subgroup H and every $\pi $ -subgroup of G is contained in a conjugate of H. We give a new $D_{\pi }$ -criterion following Wielandt’s idea, which is a generalisation of Wielandt’s and Rusakov’s results.

We present a representation formula for translating soliton surfaces to the mean curvature flow in Euclidean space ${\mathbb {R}}^{4}$ and give examples of conformal parameterisations for translating soliton surfaces.

A thin set is defined to be an uncountable dense zero-dimensional subset of measure zero and Hausdorff measure zero of an Euclidean space. A fat set is defined to be an uncountable dense path-connected subset of an Euclidean space which has full measure, that is, its complement has measure zero. While there are well-known pathological maps of a set of measure zero, such as the Cantor set, onto an interval, we show that the standard addition on $\mathbb {R}$ maps a thin set onto a fat set; in fact the fat set is all of $\mathbb {R}$ . Our argument depends on the theorem of Paul Erdős that every real number is a sum of two Liouville numbers. Our thin set is the set $\mathcal {L}^{2}$ , where $\mathcal {L}$ is the set of all Liouville numbers, and the fat set is $\mathbb {R}$ itself. Finally, it is shown that $\mathcal {L}$ and $\mathcal {L}^{2}$ are both homeomorphic to $\mathbb {P}$ , the space of all irrational numbers.

No group has exactly one or two nonpower subgroups. We classify groups containing exactly three nonpower subgroups and show that there is a unique finite group with exactly four nonpower subgroups. Finally, we show that given any integer k greater than $4$ , there are infinitely many groups with exactly k nonpower subgroups.

We investigate some properties of complex structures on Lie algebras. In particular, we focus on nilpotent complex structures that are characterised by suitable J-invariant ascending or descending central series, $\mathfrak {d}^{\,j}$ and $\mathfrak {d}_j$ , respectively. We introduce a new descending series $\mathfrak {p}_j$ and use it to prove a new characterisation of nilpotent complex structures. We also examine whether nilpotent complex structures on stratified Lie algebras preserve the strata. We find that there exists a J-invariant stratification on a step $2$ nilpotent Lie algebra with a complex structure.

We completely determine finite abelian regular branched covers of the 2-sphere $S^{2}$ with the property that each homeomorphism of $S^{2}$ preserving the branching set can be lifted.