Grassmannians of Classical Buildings

Book excerpt: Buildings are combinatorial constructions successfully exploited to study groups of various types. The vertex set of a building can be naturally decomposed into subsets called Grassmannians. The book contains both classical and more recent results on Grassmannians of buildings of classical types. It gives a modern interpretation of some classical results from the geometry of linear groups. The presented methods are applied to some geometric constructions non-related to buildings Grassmannians of infinite-dimensional vector spaces and the sets of conjugate linear involutions. The book is self-contained and the requirement for the reader is a knowledge of basic algebra and graph theory. This makes it very suitable for use in a course for graduate students.