Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2007
This paper is an excerpt from a Rayleigh essay submitted at the University of Cambridge in January 1970. We reproduce it now as it gives a general construction of a family of Moufang loops to which all bar one of the finite subloops of the Cayley algebra belong. These subloops were classified up to isomorphism in the original essay, but are classified up to equivalence under the action of the group of symmetries of in Boddington and Rumynin [1]. Explicitly, given a group G with an element a such that a2=1 in its centre, we construct a Moufang group in which G has index 2. will be non-associative unless G is abelian.