The transitive groups of degree 48 and some applications
Abstract
The primary purpose of this paper is to report on the successful enumeration in Magma of representatives of the 195\,826\,352 conjugacy classes of transitive subgroups of the symmetric group S48 of degree 48. In addition, we have determined that 25707 of these groups are minimal transitive and that 713 of them are elusive. The minimal transitive examples have been used to enumerate the vertex-transitive graphs of degree 48, of which there are 1\,538\,868\,366, all but 0.1625\% of which arise as Cayley graphs. We have also found that the largest number of elements required to generate any of these groups is 10, and we have used this fact to improve previous general bounds of the third author on the number of elements required to generate an arbitrary transitive permutation group of a given degree. The details of the proof of this improved bound will be published by the third author as a separate paper