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Does anyone know of an English (or French) translation of Witt's paper Die 5-fach transitiven Gruppen von Mathieu ? (It's the one in which the Witt design is introduced. Well, I guess.)

Here's an auxilliary question. Assuming there is no translation available and I end up writing one (after all it's only 9 pages long and there's "google translate" to help...), where would be a nice place to put it on the Internet? I thought maybe on the arxiv, with the title in the meta-data being "A translation of Witt's paper Die 5-fach...", while the title in the actual PDF file would be a "Mathieu's 5-transitive groups" or something.

Thanks,

Pierre

Pierre
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    There aren't likely to be any official translations, though informal ones may be available from individuals. While our library doesn't provide online access to older issues of this journal (still published by Springer), here is the information: http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=3069689 (but note that the article itself is still under copyright, so posting a translation in any format is legally very tricky). – Jim Humphreys Feb 16 '15 at 13:18

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In light of this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Papers-Abhandlungen-Ernst-Witt/dp/3642150950 (Collected Papers - Gesammelte Abhandlungen by Ernst Witt) it seems very few (if any) of Witt's papers were translated in English, because only comments are given in English and not the papers themselves.

If you translate the article, arXiv will be an excellent choice to put it on the Internet, in my opinion. "At our days arXiv is considered as a synonym of wisdom, scientific freedom, enlightenment and progress!" - from here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6789

Zurab Silagadze
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  • The reference to Witt's collected papers is useful, but your comment on arXiv is not so useful due to copyright problems. In any case, it's not clear that the people who oversee arXiv would agree to publish a translation of an older paper; this forum exists mainly as a place to post preprints of original work not yet published formally elsewhere. – Jim Humphreys Feb 16 '15 at 17:22
  • There may be copyright issues with an arXiv submission, but at least at a first reading of the help files there it does not seem to be out of scope. I'd suggest contacting the arXiv administrators for further clarification. – Michael Albert Feb 16 '15 at 22:35
  • It is true that translations involve more complex copyright considerations than normal research articles. However otherwise arXiv does accept translations of previously published work: http://arxiv.org/help/translations here are some examples: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503066 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0101093 http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5642 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412030 http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.1175 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0006158 http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2192 – Zurab Silagadze Feb 17 '15 at 04:16