17): t? L It CIFDr- wei unsre Weisheit Einfalt ist, From "Lohengrin," Richard Wagner At the time of the appearance of the first volume of this work in 1967, the tempestuous development of finite group theory had already made it virtually impossible to give a complete presentation of the subject in one treatise. The present volume and its successor have therefore the more modest aim of giving descriptions of the recent development of certain important parts of the subject, and even in these parts no attempt at completeness has been made. Chapter VII deals with the representation theory of...

Und dann erst kommt der "Ab -ge - sa. ng' da. /3 der nidlt kurz und nicht zu la. ng, From "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg", Richard Wagner This final volume is concerned with some of the developments of the subject in the 1960's. In attempting to determine the simple groups, the first step was to settle the conjecture of Burnside that groups of odd order are soluble. The proof that this conjecture was correct is much too long and complicated for presentation in this text, but a number of ideas in the early stages of it led to a local theory of finite groups, so me aspects of which are...