Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Recent work of Atiyah (1) on the Grothendieck rings of classifying spaces of finite groups has yielded, among many other interesting results, a spectral sequence relating the simple integer cohomology of a finite group to its representation ring. He has determined the first differential operator of the spectral sequence which affects the p-part of the cohomology, and the question naturally arises, when is it the only non-zero one. My object in this note is to show that this is so for a large class of groups.