The Mathieu Group M 12 and Its Pseudogroup Extension

We study a construction of the Mathieu group M12 using a game reminiscent of Loyd’s “15-puzzle”. The elements of M12 are realized as permutations on 12 of the 13 points of the finite projective plane of order 3. There is a natural extension to a “pseudogroup” M13 acting on all 13 points, which exhibits a limited form of sextuple transitivity. Another corollary of the construction is a metric, akin to that induced by a Cayley graph, on both M12 and M13. We develop these results, and extend them to the double covers and automorphism groups of M12 and M13, using the ternary Golay code and 12 × 12 Hadamard matrices. In addition, we use experimental data on the quasi-Cayley metric to gain some insight into the structure of these groups and pseudogroups.