A NEW CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MATHIEU GROUPS AND ALTERNATING GROUPS WITH DEGREES PRIMES

In the past thirty years, several kinds of quantitative characterizations of finite groups especially finite simple groups have been investigated by many mathematicians. Such as quantitative characterizations by group order and element orders, by element orders alone, by the set of sizes of conjugacy classes, by dimensions of irreducible characters, by the set of orders of maximal abelian subgroups and so on. Here the authors continue this topic in a new area tending to characterize finite simple groups with given orders by some special conjugacy class sizes, such as largest conjugacy class sizes, smallest conjugacy class sizes greater than 1 and so on.