The latest edition (the 19th) of the Kourovka Notebook has just been released. It now has its own website, https://kourovka-notebook.org/.

The Kourovka Notebook has been going for more than 50 years, longer than my life as a mathematician. It is a problem book for group theory and related areas, and now contains somewhere around a thousand problems, 111 of them new in this edition. The first edition appeared in 1965, and the KN did a remarkable job of encouraging communication across the Iron Curtain in those tense times. There are about 20 problems from that first edition still unsolved, and the first two to be attributed (rather than just labelled “Well known problem”) are by Mal’cev and Magnus. The last two questions ask whether the identical relations of a polycyclic group, or of a matrix group in characteristic zero, have a finite basis. This was a time of great…