Personal Details

• Position: Lecturer.
• Research: My research interests are (mostly) in group theory.

Contact Details

• Departmental address: Department of Mathematics, Cork Institute of Technology, Bishopstown, Cork, Ireland.
• Office: C224
• Phone: 021 433 6186
• Email: robert dot heffernan at cit dot ie

Research

My research interests are primarily in the area of group theory.  Initially, my work was in finite group theory (commuting probability, p-groups and their automorphisms, some character theory) but, more recently, I have developed an interest in geometric group theory.

Publications

• R. Heffernan, D. MacHale, A. Ni She: Central factor groups and commutativity submitted to Mathematical Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (to appear)
• R. Heffernan, D. MacHale, B. McCann: Cayley's theorem revisited: Embeddings of small finite groups submitted to Mathematics Magazine, (to appear).
• R. Heffernan, D. MacHale, A. Ni She: Restrictions on commutativity ratios in finite groups in the International Journal of Group Theory, 3 (4), 1--12 (2014).
• J. Curran, R. Heffernan and D. MacHale: On the Order of the Automorphism Group of a Finite Group in Communications in Algebra, 39 (10), 3616-3624, (2011).
• E. C. Freuder, R. Heffernan, R. J. Wallace and N. Wilson: Lexicographically-ordered Constraint Satisfaction Problems in Constraints, 15 (1), 1383-7133 (2010).
• R. Heffernan and D. MacHale: On the sum of the character degrees of a finite group in Mathematical Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 108A (1), 57-63 (2008).
• E. C. Freuder, R. Heffernan and R. J. Wallace: Ordinal constraint satisfaction in The Proceedings of 5th International Workshop on Soft Constraints, 2003.