Local identification of spherical buildings and finite simple groups of Lie type

Abstract

AbstractWe give a short proof of the uniqueness of finite spherical buildings of rank at least 3 in terms of the structure of the rank 2 residues and use this result to prove a result making it possible to identify an arbitrary finite group of Lie type from knowledge of its “parabolic structure” alone. Our proof also involves a connection between loops, “Latin chamber systems” and buildings.