Transposable character tables, dual groups

Abstract

One way of expressing the self-duality $A\cong \Hom(A,\mathbb{C})$ of Abelian groups is that their character tables are self-transpose (in a suitable ordering). Noncommutative groups fail to satisfy this property. In this paper we extend the duality to some noncommutative groups considering when the character table of a finite group is close to being the transpose of the character table for some other group. We find that groups dual to each other have dual normal subgroup lattices. We show that our concept of duality cannot work for non-nilpotent groups and we describe $p$-group examples.