We explain three methods for showing that the $p$-adic monodromy of a modular family of abelian varieties is ‘as large as possible', and illustrate them in the case of the ordinary locus of the moduli space of $g$-dimensional principally polarized abelian varieties over a field of characteristic $p$. The first method originated from Ribet's proof of the irreducibility of the Igusa tower for Hilbert modular varieties. The second and third methods both exploit Hecke correspondences near a hypersymmetric point, but in slightly different ways. The third method was inspired by work of Hida, plus a group theoretic argument for the maximality of $\ell$-adic monodromy with $\ell\neq p$.

In this paper, we prove that the modular curve $X(11)$ over a field of characteristic 3 admits the Mathieu group $M_{11}$ as an automorphism group. We also examine some aspects of the geometry of the curve $X(11)$ in characteristic 3. In particular, we show that every point of the curve is a point of inflection, the curve has 110 hyperflexes and there are no inflectional triangles and 11232 inflectional pentagons, of which 144 are self-conjugate. The hyperflexes correspond to the supersingular elliptic curves. We comment on the relationship of Ward's quadrilinear invariant for $M_{12}$ to our work and announce for the first time the equations for Klein's A-curve of level 11. We also comment on the relation of our work to some unpublished work of Bott and Tate.

1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 11F32, 11G20, 14G10, 14H10, 14N10, 20B25, 20C34.