A few more facts about group actions
There’s another thing I should have mentioned before. When a group 
acts on a set 
, there is a bijection between the orbit of a point 
and the set of cosets of 
in . In fact, 
if and only if 
if and only if 
is in if and only if 
. This is the the bijection we need.
This has a few immediate corollaries. Yesterday, I mentioned the normalizer 
of a subgroup 
. When a subgroup 
acts on by conjugation we call the isotropy group of an element of the “centralizer” 
of in . This gives us the following special cases of the above theorem:
- The number of elements in the conjugacy class of in is the number of cosets of
in .
- The number of subgroups conjugate to in is the number of cosets of in .
In fact, since we’re starting to use this “the number of cosets” phrase a lot it’s time to introduce a bit more notation. When is a subgroup of a group , the number of cosets of in is written ![\left[G:H\right]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%5BG%3AH%5Cright%5D&bg=e6e6e6&fg=333333&s=0 "\left[G:H\right]")
. Note that this doesn’t have to be a finite number, but when (and thus ) is finite, it is equal to the number of elements in divided by the number in . Also notice that if is normal, there are elements in 
.
This is why we could calculate the number of permutations with a given cycle type the way we did: we picked a representative 
of the conjugacy class and calculated ![\left[S_n:C_{S_n}(g)\right]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%5BS_n%3AC_%7BS_n%7D%28g%29%5Cright%5D&bg=e6e6e6&fg=333333&s=0 "\left[S_n:C_{S_n}(g)\right]")
.
One last application: We call a group action “free” if every element other than the identity has no fixed points. In this case, is always the trivial group, so the number of points in the orbit of is ![\left[G:G_x\right]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%5BG%3AG_x%5Cright%5D&bg=e6e6e6&fg=333333&s=0 "\left[G:G_x\right]")
is the number of elements of . We saw such a free action of Rubik’s Group, which is why every orbit of the group in the set of states of the cube has the same size.
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February 24, 2007 -
Posted by John Armstrong |
Algebra, Group Actions, Group theory
I get four “formula does not parse” errors. Looking at the ALT text, I’d guess that these are due to that bug where WordPress decided that brackets had to be done as \left[ and \right].
Thanks. Got ‘em.
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