On the number of conjugacy classes of a primitive permutation group

Abstract

Let $G$ be a primitive permutation group of degree $n$ with nonabelian socle, and let $k(G)$ be the number of conjugacy classes of $G$ . We prove that either $k(G)< n/2$ and $k(G)=o(n)$ as $n\rightarrow \infty$ , or $G$ belongs to explicit families of examples.