A family of Fitting classes of supersoluble groups

Abstract

A class of groups that is closed with respect to subnormal subgroups and normal products is called a Fitting class. Given a finite soluble group G, one may ask for the Fitting class (G) generated by G, that is the intersection of all Fitting classes containing G. For simple or nilpotent groups G it is easy to compute (G), but in other cases the determination of (G) seems to be surprisingly difficult, and there is no general method of solving this problem. In recent years there has been a lot of work in this area, see for instance Bryce and Cossey[l], [2], Hawkes[6] (or [5], IX. 9. Var. II), Heineken[7] and McCann[10].