This two-volume book contains selected papers from the international conference 'Groups St Andrews 1997 in Bath'. The articles cover a wide spectrum of modern group theory. There are articles based on lecture courses given by five main speakers together with refereed survey and research articles contributed by other conference participants. Proceedings of earlier 'Groups St Andrews' conferences have had a major impact on the development of group theory and these volumes should be equally important.

Table of Contents:
1. Radical rings and products of groups W. Amberg and Y. Sysak; 2. Homogeneous integral table algebras of degrees two, three and four with a faithful element Z. Arad; 3. Statistical methods in algorithms for finite groups L. Babai and R. Beals; 4. Totally and mutually permutable products of finite groups A. Ballester-Bolinches, M. D. Perez-Ramos and M. C. Pedraza-Aguilera; 5. Ends and algebraic directions of pseudogroups A. Bis; 6. On locally nilpotent groups with the minimal condition on centralizers V. Bludov; 7. Infinite groups in projective and symplectic geometry F. Bogomolov and L. Katzarkov; 8. Non-positive curvature in group theory M. R. Bridson; 9. Group theoretic applications of non-commutative toric geometry C. J. B. Brookes; 10. Theorems of Kegel-Wielandt type A. Carocca and R. R. Maier; 11. Singly generated radicals associated with varieties of groups C. Casacuberta, J. L. Rodriguez and D. Scevenels; 12. The word problem in groups of cohomological dimension 2 D. J. Collins and C. F. Miller III; 13. Polycyclic-by-finite groups: from affine to polynomial structures K. Dekimpe; 14. On groups with rank restrictions on subgroups M. R. Dixon, M. J. Evans and H. Smith; 15. On distances of multiplication tables of groups A. Drapal; 16. The Dade conjecture for the McLaughlin group G. Entz and H. Pahlings; 17. Automorphism groups of certain non-quasiprimitive almost simple graphs X. G. Fang, G. Havas and J. Wang; 18. Subgroups of the upper-triangular matrix group with maximal derived length and a minimal number of generators S. P. Glasby; 19. On p-pronormal subgroups of finite p-soluble groups M Gomez-Fernandez; 20. On the system of defining relations and the Schur multiplier of periodic groups generated by finite automata R. I. Grigorchuk; 21. On the dimension of groups acting on buildings J. Harlander; 22. Dade's conjecture for the simple Higman–Sims group N. M. Hassan and E. Horvath; 23. On the F* - Theorem M. Hertweck and W. Kimmerle; 24. Covering numbers for groups M. Herzog; 25. Characterizing subnormally closed formations M. C. Hofmann; 26. Symmetric words in a free nilpotent group of class 5 W. Holubowski; 27. A non-residually finite square of finite groups T. Hsu and D. Wise.