Strongly real groups and totally orthogonal groups form two important subclasses of real groups. In this article we give a characterization of strongly real special 2-groups. This characterization is in terms of quadratic maps over fields of characteristic 2. We then provide examples of groups which are in one subclass and not the other. It is a conjecture of Tiep that such examples are not possible for finite simple groups. Like O n (q) there are plenty of groups which are both totally orthogonal and strongly real. According to a conjecture of Tiep finite simple groups are totally orthogonal if and only if they 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 20C15, 20C33.

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This paper concerns the enumeration of simultaneous conjugacy classes of [Formula: see text]-tuples of commuting matrices in the upper triangular group [Formula: see text] and unitriangular group [Formula: see text] over the finite field [Formula: see text] of odd characteristic. This is done for [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], by computing the branching rules. Further, using the branching matrix thus computed, we explicitly get the commuting probabilities [Formula: see text] for [Formula: see text] in each case.

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Let [Formula: see text] be a field of characteristic 2. In this paper, we provide an interesting application of quadratic forms over [Formula: see text] in determination of the Wedderburn decomposition of the rational group algebra [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a real special [Formula: see text]-group. We further apply these computations to exhibit two non-isomorphic real special [Formula: see text]-groups with isomorphic rational group algebra.