C ricket geeks love numbers. It is amazing that there are only 42 rules of cricket but the statistics on the game fill libraries. I wonder whether the late Douglas Adams had that number in mind when he wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the planet-sized super computer ‘‘Deep Thought’’ came up with the same answer to the question of the meaning of life. What is it about cricket that ...

The classification of spherical varieties is already known for semisimple groups of types A and D. Adding type E, we complete the classification for all semisimple groups with a simply laced Dynkin diagram.

In the setting of strict wonderful varieties we answer positively to Luna’s conjecture, saying that wonderful varieties are classified by combinatorial objects, the so-called spherical systems. In particular, we prove that strict wonderful varieties are mostly obtained from symmetric spaces, spherical nilpotent orbits or model spaces. To make the paper self-contained as much as possible, we sha...