The admissibility of sporadic simple groups

In 1955 Hall and Paige conjectured that a finite group is admissible, i.e.. admits complete mappings, if its Sylow 2-subgroup is trivial or noncyclic. In a recent paper, Wilcox proved that any minimal counterexample to this conjecture Must be simple, and further, must be either the Tits group or a sporadic simple group. In this paper we improve on this result by proving that the fourth Janko group is the only possible minimal counterexample to this conjecture: John Bray reports having proved that this group is also not a counterexample, thus completing a proof of the Hall-Paige conjecture. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.