Proceedings of Groups – St Andrews 1985: Maximal subgroups of sporadic groups

A systematic study of maximal subgroups of the sporadic simple groups began in the 1960s. The work is now almost complete, only a few cases in the Monster remaining outstanding. We give a survey of results obtained, and methods used, over the past 50 years, for the classification of maximal subgroups of sporadic simple groups, and their automorphism groups.