Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In (1), Burgoyne and Fong have shown that the Schur multiplier of the Mathieu group M12 is of order 2. It is shown in Theorem 2·4 that the Schur multiplier of Aut M12, the automorphism group of M12, is also of order 2. It is therefore possible to choose a complex 2-cocycle α of Aut M12, taking only the values 1 and − 1, such that the cohomology class of α is of order 2 and the cohomology class of the restriction of α to M12 is of order 2. The characters of the irreducible α-projective representations of Aut M12 are calculated in § 2.