We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server end of 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian symmetric spaces with semisimple transvection group are known and classified for a long time. Contrary to that the description of pseudo-Riemannian symmetric spaces with non-semisimple transvection group is an open problem. In the last years some progress on this problem was achieved. In this article we want to explain these results and some of their applications.