In group theory, the term pariah was introduced by Robert Griess in to refer to the six sporadic simple groups which are not subquotients of the monster group.
The twenty groups which are subquotients, including the monster group itself, he dubbed the happy family.
For example, the orders of J<sub>4</sub> and the Lyons Group Ly are divisible by 37. Since 37 does not divide the order of the monster, these cannot be subquotients of it; thus J<sub>4</sub> and Ly are pariahs. Three other sporadic groups were also shown to be pariahs by Griess in 1982, and the Janko Group J<sub>1</sub> was shown to be the final pariah by Robert A. Wilson in 1986.
The Lyons group, , is the unique group (up to isomorphism) that has in involution where is the covering group of the alternating group , and is not weakly closed in . Richard Lyons, the namesake of these groups, was the first to consider their properties, including their order, and Charles Sims proved with machine calculation that such a group must exist and be unique. The group has an order of .
The Rudvalis group is a finite simple group that is a rank 3 permutation group on 4060 letters where the stabilizer of a point is the Ree group. The group was described by Arunas Rudvalis, who proved the existence of such a group. This group has order of .